One of the nauseating aspects of being American is what occurs when the military or a sporting team in some form or other registers a triumph. The killing of Osama bin Laden represents this phenomenon perfectly. Though the president did not gloat when he made his late night announcement on Sunday, he left no doubt that “justice had been done,” and that the “world would be a safer place” without this monster. The clear implication, from him and from his chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, was that there had been a “fierce firefight” in the course of which the evil terrorist had been slain. Brennan also asserted that Osama had used his wives as human shields (see, he’s just a coward; actual words: “I think it really just speaks to how false his narrative has been over the years.”), a claim the administration later backed away from. Only later still did we discover the details, and they are not pretty.
First we learned that far from the evidence being made public—the body in question, or even photos of the dead leader—it was gone: the corpse had been disposed of at sea (what, Osama the sailor?) and there would be no photos either. Osama bin Laden had been shot in the eye and apparently his dead head was not suitable for primetime viewing—the children, you know. Then we were told that fiercely opposing the notoriously-efficient 25-man death squad of Navy Seals were only two (2) men besides Osama—his courier and the courier’s brother, with one or both families—and one or two women or wives, in addition to Osama’s children. So the “courage and bravery of these men who risked their lives” was not so conspicuous after all. They had not assaulted an enemy encampment bristling with murderous guards, but a domestic scene of about 7 or 8 people. Their usual night raids in Afghanistan and Iraq probably posed far more dangers for this assassination squad on a nightly basis than this, their most conspicuous mission.
Now we learn from White House press secretary Jay Carney, in response to questions from reporters, that the great emblem of global evil was NOT ARMED. He had no weapon with which to defend himself, but of course the press secretary was quick to add that a woman had attacked the brave Navy Seals, who shot her in the leg. Then Osama’s wife apparently threatened them, or made threatening gestures, and they then shot Osama bin Laden in the head—through the eye. Others, like Brennan, have said bin Laden resisted, though how is not clear. No matter: Navy Seals armed to the teeth and coated in body armor apparently feared for their lives and quite reasonably had to shoot him. (We will no doubt hear the inside story from one of them, after the narrative has been duly ghost-written to best display their heroism).
None of this makes sense, except in this way. Though the Attorney General (Tuesday News Hour) insisted that the instructions were to take bin Laden into custody, or if necessary, to kill him, the clear implication of all we’ve learned so far indicates that the kill order was primary. These guys were sent to kill Osama bin Laden, and there was little or no chance that he would be brought back to the United States alive to stand trial. And so, what the President crowed was “justice” and what pundits in every forum have continued to proclaim as “justice” was really a targeted assassination. The evil bin Laden received justice by assassination, American justice in this case consisting of a bullet in the head, and a dump in the ocean.
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t strike me as justice to cheer about. What it reminds us of is the kind of “justice” the Israelis have perfected: targeted assassination. They decide that some Palestinian is a “terrorist” who deserves to die, and then send in a team or a rocket to act as judge, jury, and executioner, collateral damage be damned. We seem to have learned well from them; for justice in the bin Laden case was streamlined to the killing of someone you prefer not to bring to trial for fear that a courtroom is far less efficient and far more uncertain. And when we reflect that even Saddam Hussein, that prior emblem of evil (isn’t is marvelous how the mantle of ultimate evil can be shifted from one postered head to another, and back, without so much as a by your leave?), was captured and brought to trial, we have to wonder why Osama was not shot in the leg or the arm or simply overpowered (he had no weapon!) rather than being shot in the eye (one wonders about the caliber of the weapon that shot that eye, but with the rapid-fire cannons these guys carry, the resulting wound was no doubt ample).
The logical answer is that, like many other American operations designed to rally us round the flag, this was a revenge killing. Americans, as after Pearl Harbor when revenge took the form of nuclear destruction, have been thirsting for revenge, but were diverted to Saddam and Iraq right after 9/11. What remained, though, after flattening both, was that emotional need to “get” the bastard who allegedly masterminded 9/11. When the opportunity presented itself, the current president, like all politicians with an eye to poll numbers, took the cue from his Israeli partners: assassinate the bastard. The rubes will cheer and shout “USA USA,” which indeed they did. And the pundits will pontificate about “justice” being done, and the people will be satisfied with being, once again, NUMBER ONE. As if killing people in cold blood is equivalent to some Olympic sport. All that’s lacking is a tradition that used to prevail among tribal societies, where you not only dance over the killing of your enemy, but eat his significant organs. Perhaps soon, that great atavism will return among us as well. Meantime we can content ourselves with a “courageous” brain explosion via a bullet to the eye (is there symbolism here? i.e., that evil eye can no longer fix us in its sights), and the feeding of the corpse to our ravenous surrogates, the fishes.
Lawrence DiStasi
Friday, May 06, 2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
The End of Empire
Various observers, including myself, have been speculating for years on the resemblance of America in the 21st century to the Rome described by Gibbon in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Especially after George W. led the country into a useless and illegal war in Iraq, all of it on America’s already overdrawn credit card, and the madness emanating from the fundamentalist revival of recent years, the comparison has become all but inevitable, if always couched in the future tense. Now, however, the IMF has dropped what Brett Arends has called a “bombshell.” Its latest economic forecast of economic activity has predicted that “China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016—just five years from now” (Brett Arends, “IMF Bombshell: Age of America Nears End,” Yahoo Finance, April 26, 2011, online). That’s five (5) years from now, folks. The figures are based on something called “purchasing power parities,” a figure Arends calls the true figure for comparison because it “compares what people earn and spend in real terms in their domestic economies.” As Arends explains the figures, by 2016, China’s economy is predicted to expand from $11.2 trillion this year to “$19 trillion in 2016.” The U.S economy will also rise, but at a slower rate: from “$15.2 trillion this year to $18.8 trillion” in 2016. America’s share of world output would thus shrink to 17.7% while China’s will rise to 18% and beyond. For a comparison, Arends startles us with this: 10 years ago the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s.
Now there are lots of ramifications to this prediction, but one cited by Arends has great relevance to our current mess. He quotes Ralph Gomory, a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School, comparing China’s “state-guided capitalism,” with our “free” one:
What we have seen, he [Gomory] said, is “a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That's very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages.” (Emphasis mine.)
I think that tells us a lot of what we need to know. Apparently, Chinese businessmen are not allowed to sell their own country down the river; quite the opposite, in fact. Chinese policy has emphasized “national expansion and power,” while the U.S. has allowed its corporate giants and speculating Wall Steeters to outsource the world’s premier production enterprise along with the American jobs that once went with it—enriching themselves, of course, via lower costs, but bankrupting the nation.
Again, the ramifications for what Arends calls a “paradigm shift” are massive, not just regarding who becomes the world’s military hegemon (we can hardly afford the wars we’re already stuck in, not to mention the 700 or so military bases we maintain), but especially with respect to the value of the dollar, because when it is replaced as the world’s reserve currency, no one can predict what will happen. It’s a fair bet, though, that it won’t be good—which is probably why gold has been shooting up in value recently.
For the average American, though, this is going to be strange. Most of us have had the “good” fortune to grow up in an America that essentially ruled the world. Its way of life and opportunities for average people were said to be the standard by which the world measured such things. Indeed, it was only a short time ago that the Bushies were prating on about our responsibilities, military and didactic, as the “only remaining Superpower.” To suddenly be living in a nation which has lost its mojo (the U.S. credit rating has already been downgraded by Standard & Poor’s) and has to ask or petition rather than command is going to feel like a brave new world, indeed. Oh there will still be cheerleaders and politicians who will insist it ain’t so, or who will blame it on the poor. But the odor of change is already blowin’ in the wind and it won’t be the kind Bob Dylan was singing about.
Lawrence DiStasi
Now there are lots of ramifications to this prediction, but one cited by Arends has great relevance to our current mess. He quotes Ralph Gomory, a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School, comparing China’s “state-guided capitalism,” with our “free” one:
What we have seen, he [Gomory] said, is “a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That's very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages.” (Emphasis mine.)
I think that tells us a lot of what we need to know. Apparently, Chinese businessmen are not allowed to sell their own country down the river; quite the opposite, in fact. Chinese policy has emphasized “national expansion and power,” while the U.S. has allowed its corporate giants and speculating Wall Steeters to outsource the world’s premier production enterprise along with the American jobs that once went with it—enriching themselves, of course, via lower costs, but bankrupting the nation.
Again, the ramifications for what Arends calls a “paradigm shift” are massive, not just regarding who becomes the world’s military hegemon (we can hardly afford the wars we’re already stuck in, not to mention the 700 or so military bases we maintain), but especially with respect to the value of the dollar, because when it is replaced as the world’s reserve currency, no one can predict what will happen. It’s a fair bet, though, that it won’t be good—which is probably why gold has been shooting up in value recently.
For the average American, though, this is going to be strange. Most of us have had the “good” fortune to grow up in an America that essentially ruled the world. Its way of life and opportunities for average people were said to be the standard by which the world measured such things. Indeed, it was only a short time ago that the Bushies were prating on about our responsibilities, military and didactic, as the “only remaining Superpower.” To suddenly be living in a nation which has lost its mojo (the U.S. credit rating has already been downgraded by Standard & Poor’s) and has to ask or petition rather than command is going to feel like a brave new world, indeed. Oh there will still be cheerleaders and politicians who will insist it ain’t so, or who will blame it on the poor. But the odor of change is already blowin’ in the wind and it won’t be the kind Bob Dylan was singing about.
Lawrence DiStasi
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Conservative Morality
We have seen in grim detail recently just what the Republican program for “solving” our deficit problem is going to entail when Representative Paul Ryan (now Chair of the House Budget Committee) presented his plan for cutting nearly $6 trillion from the deficit. It involved big cuts in spending for social programs—especially Medicare and Medicaid—and NO raising of taxes, especially on the rich. The bitter pill prescribed by the Republicans, in brief, puts the onus of sacrifice on the poorest, most helpless of our citizens in order that the wealthiest, most powerful can avoid sacrifice altogether and continue to thrive beyond all imagining. The House passed this plan April 15 on a strictly party-line vote, nearly all Republicans voting for it, and all Democrats opposing it.
What we have come to in this country, then, is a situation where a major party makes little attempt to hide its callousness toward the poor and weak and its devotion to the strong and rich. Oh, Republicans prate on about the “great crisis” of growing deficits, but their emphasis is on the unsustainability of the “social handouts” instituted by Democrats: Social Security, Medicare, and other attempts to mitigate the suffering of the least among us.
What I keep wondering is what kind of people could adopt programs and policies of this kind. Who could be so heartless as to essentially thumb their noses at the vast majority of human beings on this planet (see also Republican-led House vote April 7 to kill EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases and the science they’re based on)? A recent book by Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape) may offer a few answers. It is not that Harris’ book proposes any kind of socially conscious program. It is that in reviewing neuroscientific and psychological research on the possible cognitive bases for morality, Harris cites studies that are quite revealing indeed about such subjects as psychopathology, religion, belief, and the human capacity for empathy.
Begin with a series of studies by the psychologist Paul Slovic, especially concerning our capacity to reason morally about suffering. What Slovic has found is that humans seem to have an innate mechanism that predisposes most of us to show concern when a single, identifiable human life is threatened, but to decrease our concern almost to indifference when more lives are involved. In other words, there is a “psychic numbing” that sets in as the number of victims of any kind of disaster rises. Instead of being MORE concerned the more people are affected by an earthquake, say, our concern grows progressively less as the death toll rises. This is revealed in donations: people give generously when they are shown a single child suffering; but with two children, the donations drop, while, as more children are shown suffering, the donations (and compassion) grow progressively less. There’s even a name for this: the “identifiable victim effect.” What I wonder is if Republicans/conservatives operate in a more exaggerated way than others in this regard. They pride themselves on being very compassionate to their own. But when it’s thousands or millions of inner city kids who are starving, or millions of homeless who have fallen on hard times, or many millions of seniors who depend on the pittance they derive from social security or medicare, Republican compassion disappears. Let them eat cake.
Such focus on the concern (or lack of it) for the suffering of others brings to the fore another area of research, the study of psychopathology. Psychopaths (and we seem to have had some great examples in high office recently) are characterized by able intelligence and even “sanity” (they understand the difference between right and wrong), but a kind of deficit in their ability to feel compassion for the pain or suffering of others. Many violent criminals are categorized as psychopaths: they simply seem unable to feel anything for their victims. Neuroimaging work now suggests that psychopathy is
…a product of pathological arousal and reward. People scoring high on the psychopathic personality inventory show abnormally high activity in the reward regions of their brain (in particular, the nucleus accumbens) in response to amphetamine and while anticipating monetary gains. (p. 98)
Researchers speculate that since psychopaths respond excessively to anticipated rewards (I’m gonna get rich!), their ability to learn from the negative emotions of others is correspondingly reduced or blocked. In fact, in tests asking psychopaths to identify the mental states of other people from photographs, psychopaths do as well as others except in one area: they seem “unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others.” This failure in emotional learning (a human trait crucial to socialization that is shared even by our primate relatives) seems to be one key to psychopathy: neuroscientists believe that impairments in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are associated with the emotional failure. Thus blind to the suffering he causes, the psychopath keeps reinforcing his callousness and cruelty, and simply never learns to care about others. While no one would say that all Republicans or conservatives are psychopaths, surely we can see that their apparent failure in empathy (or perhaps their reduced “circle of empathy”—i.e. limited to only those with whom they have close relations) resembles in alarming ways the indifference to human suffering exhibited by the psychopathic personality.
Finally, we see that Republicans/conservatives often tend to be those who demand open, public fealty to religious belief, more specifically, belief in the literal Christian dictates of the Bible (“57% of Americans think one must believe in God to have good values and to be moral, and 69% want a president guided by strong religious belief”). Their demands to end abortion (Rick Santorum recently made a speech in which he attributed the allegedly failing Social Security system to a high abortion rate—so many children not born means too few contributing to Social Security income!), and to make religion more prominent in public forums, schools, and social legislation, are but a few examples of this mania. Harris is very hard on the effects this has for American public life and for morality in general. For if, as Harris maintains, morality can be understood as fostering the well-being of the highest number in any population (rather than with how many profess belief in God), the United States falls far short of other developed nations. Though the U.S. scores extremely high on the religiosity scale, it scores far lower than many allegedly atheistic nations on the well-being/equality scale. As Harris writes, “In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality.” By contrast, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, among the most atheistic societies on the planet, all do better on measures of well-being like life expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, education, political stability, charity to poorer nations, and so on. As the capper to this critique, Harris cites a 2010 study (Hall, Matz, and Wood, “Why don’t we practice what we preach?” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1) indicating that American religious commitment is “highly correlated with racism” (146). If this isn’t strong enough, Harris also cites a recent Baltimore court case in which a small Christian group (One Mind Ministries) was accused of murdering an 18-month-old infant, Javon Thompson. His sin: he stopped saying “Amen” before breakfast, an act considered rebellious by the group’s leader, Queen Antoinette. His punishment: being deprived of all food and water for days. The mother agreed to help the prosecution indict the others on condition that all charges against them would be dropped if her dead child was resurrected. Though the group carried the corpse with them for some time, the resurrection has yet to take place. (Dan Morse, “Plea deal includes resurrection clause,” Washington Post, March 31, 2009.)
Harris does not contend that religious training and/or belief trains people in murder or racism. He does suggest that ignorance and such beliefs go hand in hand, as indicated by these statistics: “42% of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world” (149). This is tantamount to saying that evolution, as confirmed by virtually all scientists, simply does not exist. Another 78% believe that the Bible is actually the word of God, while 79% of Christians believe that Jesus will “physically return to the earth.” The point is clear: If so many Americans believe in such “truths,” how can anyone expect them to be able to discern truth from falsehood, or right from wrong in any arena whatever? How can they be expected to understand or exhibit compassion towards all the “unbelievers” out there—including the billions who will be most affected by global warming? How can anyone expect them to care in the least for those homeless “sinners” on our streets who have “failed” to provide for themselves?
When I contemplate the fact that much of this nation has fallen into the hands of such fanatics and incipient psychopaths, I have to tell you, it is very hard not to despair.
Lawrence DiStasi
What we have come to in this country, then, is a situation where a major party makes little attempt to hide its callousness toward the poor and weak and its devotion to the strong and rich. Oh, Republicans prate on about the “great crisis” of growing deficits, but their emphasis is on the unsustainability of the “social handouts” instituted by Democrats: Social Security, Medicare, and other attempts to mitigate the suffering of the least among us.
What I keep wondering is what kind of people could adopt programs and policies of this kind. Who could be so heartless as to essentially thumb their noses at the vast majority of human beings on this planet (see also Republican-led House vote April 7 to kill EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases and the science they’re based on)? A recent book by Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape) may offer a few answers. It is not that Harris’ book proposes any kind of socially conscious program. It is that in reviewing neuroscientific and psychological research on the possible cognitive bases for morality, Harris cites studies that are quite revealing indeed about such subjects as psychopathology, religion, belief, and the human capacity for empathy.
Begin with a series of studies by the psychologist Paul Slovic, especially concerning our capacity to reason morally about suffering. What Slovic has found is that humans seem to have an innate mechanism that predisposes most of us to show concern when a single, identifiable human life is threatened, but to decrease our concern almost to indifference when more lives are involved. In other words, there is a “psychic numbing” that sets in as the number of victims of any kind of disaster rises. Instead of being MORE concerned the more people are affected by an earthquake, say, our concern grows progressively less as the death toll rises. This is revealed in donations: people give generously when they are shown a single child suffering; but with two children, the donations drop, while, as more children are shown suffering, the donations (and compassion) grow progressively less. There’s even a name for this: the “identifiable victim effect.” What I wonder is if Republicans/conservatives operate in a more exaggerated way than others in this regard. They pride themselves on being very compassionate to their own. But when it’s thousands or millions of inner city kids who are starving, or millions of homeless who have fallen on hard times, or many millions of seniors who depend on the pittance they derive from social security or medicare, Republican compassion disappears. Let them eat cake.
Such focus on the concern (or lack of it) for the suffering of others brings to the fore another area of research, the study of psychopathology. Psychopaths (and we seem to have had some great examples in high office recently) are characterized by able intelligence and even “sanity” (they understand the difference between right and wrong), but a kind of deficit in their ability to feel compassion for the pain or suffering of others. Many violent criminals are categorized as psychopaths: they simply seem unable to feel anything for their victims. Neuroimaging work now suggests that psychopathy is
…a product of pathological arousal and reward. People scoring high on the psychopathic personality inventory show abnormally high activity in the reward regions of their brain (in particular, the nucleus accumbens) in response to amphetamine and while anticipating monetary gains. (p. 98)
Researchers speculate that since psychopaths respond excessively to anticipated rewards (I’m gonna get rich!), their ability to learn from the negative emotions of others is correspondingly reduced or blocked. In fact, in tests asking psychopaths to identify the mental states of other people from photographs, psychopaths do as well as others except in one area: they seem “unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others.” This failure in emotional learning (a human trait crucial to socialization that is shared even by our primate relatives) seems to be one key to psychopathy: neuroscientists believe that impairments in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are associated with the emotional failure. Thus blind to the suffering he causes, the psychopath keeps reinforcing his callousness and cruelty, and simply never learns to care about others. While no one would say that all Republicans or conservatives are psychopaths, surely we can see that their apparent failure in empathy (or perhaps their reduced “circle of empathy”—i.e. limited to only those with whom they have close relations) resembles in alarming ways the indifference to human suffering exhibited by the psychopathic personality.
Finally, we see that Republicans/conservatives often tend to be those who demand open, public fealty to religious belief, more specifically, belief in the literal Christian dictates of the Bible (“57% of Americans think one must believe in God to have good values and to be moral, and 69% want a president guided by strong religious belief”). Their demands to end abortion (Rick Santorum recently made a speech in which he attributed the allegedly failing Social Security system to a high abortion rate—so many children not born means too few contributing to Social Security income!), and to make religion more prominent in public forums, schools, and social legislation, are but a few examples of this mania. Harris is very hard on the effects this has for American public life and for morality in general. For if, as Harris maintains, morality can be understood as fostering the well-being of the highest number in any population (rather than with how many profess belief in God), the United States falls far short of other developed nations. Though the U.S. scores extremely high on the religiosity scale, it scores far lower than many allegedly atheistic nations on the well-being/equality scale. As Harris writes, “In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality.” By contrast, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, among the most atheistic societies on the planet, all do better on measures of well-being like life expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, education, political stability, charity to poorer nations, and so on. As the capper to this critique, Harris cites a 2010 study (Hall, Matz, and Wood, “Why don’t we practice what we preach?” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1) indicating that American religious commitment is “highly correlated with racism” (146). If this isn’t strong enough, Harris also cites a recent Baltimore court case in which a small Christian group (One Mind Ministries) was accused of murdering an 18-month-old infant, Javon Thompson. His sin: he stopped saying “Amen” before breakfast, an act considered rebellious by the group’s leader, Queen Antoinette. His punishment: being deprived of all food and water for days. The mother agreed to help the prosecution indict the others on condition that all charges against them would be dropped if her dead child was resurrected. Though the group carried the corpse with them for some time, the resurrection has yet to take place. (Dan Morse, “Plea deal includes resurrection clause,” Washington Post, March 31, 2009.)
Harris does not contend that religious training and/or belief trains people in murder or racism. He does suggest that ignorance and such beliefs go hand in hand, as indicated by these statistics: “42% of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world” (149). This is tantamount to saying that evolution, as confirmed by virtually all scientists, simply does not exist. Another 78% believe that the Bible is actually the word of God, while 79% of Christians believe that Jesus will “physically return to the earth.” The point is clear: If so many Americans believe in such “truths,” how can anyone expect them to be able to discern truth from falsehood, or right from wrong in any arena whatever? How can they be expected to understand or exhibit compassion towards all the “unbelievers” out there—including the billions who will be most affected by global warming? How can anyone expect them to care in the least for those homeless “sinners” on our streets who have “failed” to provide for themselves?
When I contemplate the fact that much of this nation has fallen into the hands of such fanatics and incipient psychopaths, I have to tell you, it is very hard not to despair.
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, April 18, 2011
Moral Wrecktitude
I mean the best for you, my friend
But your style of life must end
Surely I am heaven sent
To remind you to repent
From your ways of death and sin
So your new life may begin
Accept your meager wages
And read the Good Book’s pages
Look up to us, the chosen
Whose hearts are neatly frozen
Given the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood and even on some labor unions, I am once again reminded of an interview I conducted with a young Hungarian refugee in January 1957. After I listened to him for more than an hour, he suddenly looked at me very seriously and simply said: “You have never had to steal to eat.” I was a West Point cadet, a plebe, at the time and I chronicled the interview for The Pointer magazine. It was clear that his experience was different from mine with one similarity. I had experienced hunger and had gone from 147 pounds to much less than 120 pounds as a motivated cadet living with the discipline of plebe year. Involuntary withdrawal from food was common punishment. So, we both had felt hunger. But there were some significant differences as well. I wanted to be at West Point and food was not a motivator for me. Hungarians were made to ship their food to Russia and had no choice as to where they lived. Hungarians were walled-in by the Russians. When I did get food, it was clean and wholesome. His food was usually stolen from garbage cans and dumps. He watched the inequity of the distribution of food where Communist Party members were able to eat well and avoid the harsh pain felt by the masses. I watched upperclassmen eat full and satisfying meals and wanted to survive long enough to become an upperclassman. Hope was not only in my heart, but tangible because I saw a goal and did things to put it in reach. Upperclassmen had gone through similar plebe years while Communist Party leaders were exempt from privation. Today, we invoke the Christian admonition not to complain about our station in life (slave or free, remember) and urge the poor to be patient. Indeed, patience is a virtue fitting the poor. And had God favored them, they would be wealthy. In both cases the ideology sets the tone and the wage. It is not by accident. The pious politicians that screamed for the de-funding of Planned Parenthood knew or should have known that the Hyde Amendment (appropriately named for the Republican politician who long kept mistresses into his “youthful” 40s including the highly visible Cherie Snodgrass), denies federal funding for any abortion.
Moral superiority has been with us for millennia. The smugness of a Pharisee is noted in the New Testament: (Luke 18:11) “Thank you, Lord that I am not like everyone else, thieving, unjust, adulterous, and especially like that tax collector. I fast twice a week, and tithe everything I posses.” If you fast forward to the late 19th and early 20th century, the American equivalent was the Mugwump. Mugwumps were wealthy and gentrified Christians who were simply appalled at the lower classes, especially immigrants. They became politically active and tried to take away rights, especially to vote, from those citizens without property. Just as Henry Hyde saw no problem with keeping a mistress in a Springfield, IL apartment, he saw no problem with leading the House charge against Clinton for having sex with an intern or, more directly, he saw no problem with not supporting family planning to avoid the likelihood of abortions. In his investigation of Planned Parenthood, the following exchange between Hyde and Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood Is documented:
"Ms. Feldt, does it trouble you that there are so many abortions?"
"Mr. Hyde, if it troubles you," I went off script to reply, "why have you never once voted for family planning services?" Moral superiority does not worry about trifles like doing something to reduce an evil. The morally superior merely need to point it out for the morally inferior to execute.
John Kyl on the Senate floor: “Well over ninety per cent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions.” Followed by an explanation but not an apology (and not on the Senate floor): “It was not intended to be a factual statement.” (explanation via Lemon on CNN). Planned Parenthood indeed performs abortions along with myriad health support, especially for women. Abortions account for 3% of its activity and it sequesters its funding so that federal money is not used for abortions. Birth control and STD testing as well as general healthcare including breast exams and pap smear tests are made available to poor women. Ugh! Poor women. They are morally inferior to Senator Kyl, and it is not his job to actually reduce abortions. He is responsible to teach the greedy needy about morals. Maybe some of them have to steal to eat. Shame on them again. If they were good Christian women, they would be more patient and surely more submissive to their moral superiors.
Lest we think that this concept of moral superiority is restricted to controlling economically deprived women, consider the following excerpt from Bloomberg in December, 2010 that outlines the business dealings of a major American firm in Nigeria:
“Nigeria alleges the companies, which were part of group known as TSKJ, paid bribes totaling $180 million to Nigerian officials between 1994 and 2004 to win a $6 billion liquefied natural gas plant contract. KBR and Halliburton agreed to pay $579 million to U.S. authorities in February 2009 for bribery payments in Nigeria.” Dick Cheney was head of Halliburton/KBR when the bribery took place and he soon became Vice President of the US. Maybe that was a necessary business expense and if Halliburton paid taxes, surely it also used the $579 Million it paid to our government as a tax write-off. This illegal activity aided profiteering by Cheney, of course, but it also took opportunity from firms that were unwilling to bribe and from impoverished Nigerians who had no say or benefit in the distribution of their nation’s resources.
More recently, the Swedish Ikea Corporation has located a furniture factory in Danville, VA. State and local officials there gave Ikea free land and tax breaks to locate in the Right to Work for Less Commonwealth of Virginia. The starting salaries in Virginia are $8/hour without benefits, while the identical jobs in Sweden pay $19/hour with 3 weeks vacation and full medical benefits. While the cost of living may be lower in Danville, surely the cost of medical benefits is higher than zero. Be patient my Christians and don’t talk with the evil unions who surely will lead you to sin. Be patient, your time will come at the Last Judgment and remember that the Meek will inherit the earth. Therefore, be Meek and you shall inherit the earth (or what is left after the polluters are done). The lesson: Moral superiority means that I get my share now and you can wait until earth freezes over or trickle down works, whichever comes first. Does it matter that the moral superiority is imported or homegrown? Not really, since the Swedes could not have done this without American help.
The more I study our current situation and the Paul Ryan plan to have the poor finance the tax breaks for the wealthy the more I understand the logic of trickle down economics. By changing Medicare to voucher roulette for the poor who cannot afford supplemental insurance, two things happen; first, it is a windfall for healthcare insurance companies to enrich those that will still ration care (only now for paying for expenses like advertising and an unnecessary layer of administration) and, a perfect way to keep millions of Americans in poverty and ill health since a $15,000 annual voucher does nothing to reduce healthcare costs per se, but only reduce to the government budget. The tax breaks for the rich will help them pay for increasing medical expenses and the poor will die sooner thereby becoming eligible for inheriting the earth years earlier. You must look up to the morally superior. They certainly know their scripture and they are willing to give up inheritance of the earth as long as they don’t pay inheritance or any other taxes in this life. Just what is it that trickles down? I think that it is the blood, sweat, and tears of the poor, along with a little of their urine down their pants while they strain to await their inheritance coming in the next life. I guess that atheists will have to develop another theory of morality, justice and trickle down. I call this Moral Wrecktitude where misplaced morality wrecks the lives of the poor and the incredibly shrinking middle class and chills the hearts of the rich (along with their gin).
Peace,
George Giacoppe
18 April 2011
But your style of life must end
Surely I am heaven sent
To remind you to repent
From your ways of death and sin
So your new life may begin
Accept your meager wages
And read the Good Book’s pages
Look up to us, the chosen
Whose hearts are neatly frozen
Given the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood and even on some labor unions, I am once again reminded of an interview I conducted with a young Hungarian refugee in January 1957. After I listened to him for more than an hour, he suddenly looked at me very seriously and simply said: “You have never had to steal to eat.” I was a West Point cadet, a plebe, at the time and I chronicled the interview for The Pointer magazine. It was clear that his experience was different from mine with one similarity. I had experienced hunger and had gone from 147 pounds to much less than 120 pounds as a motivated cadet living with the discipline of plebe year. Involuntary withdrawal from food was common punishment. So, we both had felt hunger. But there were some significant differences as well. I wanted to be at West Point and food was not a motivator for me. Hungarians were made to ship their food to Russia and had no choice as to where they lived. Hungarians were walled-in by the Russians. When I did get food, it was clean and wholesome. His food was usually stolen from garbage cans and dumps. He watched the inequity of the distribution of food where Communist Party members were able to eat well and avoid the harsh pain felt by the masses. I watched upperclassmen eat full and satisfying meals and wanted to survive long enough to become an upperclassman. Hope was not only in my heart, but tangible because I saw a goal and did things to put it in reach. Upperclassmen had gone through similar plebe years while Communist Party leaders were exempt from privation. Today, we invoke the Christian admonition not to complain about our station in life (slave or free, remember) and urge the poor to be patient. Indeed, patience is a virtue fitting the poor. And had God favored them, they would be wealthy. In both cases the ideology sets the tone and the wage. It is not by accident. The pious politicians that screamed for the de-funding of Planned Parenthood knew or should have known that the Hyde Amendment (appropriately named for the Republican politician who long kept mistresses into his “youthful” 40s including the highly visible Cherie Snodgrass), denies federal funding for any abortion.
Moral superiority has been with us for millennia. The smugness of a Pharisee is noted in the New Testament: (Luke 18:11) “Thank you, Lord that I am not like everyone else, thieving, unjust, adulterous, and especially like that tax collector. I fast twice a week, and tithe everything I posses.” If you fast forward to the late 19th and early 20th century, the American equivalent was the Mugwump. Mugwumps were wealthy and gentrified Christians who were simply appalled at the lower classes, especially immigrants. They became politically active and tried to take away rights, especially to vote, from those citizens without property. Just as Henry Hyde saw no problem with keeping a mistress in a Springfield, IL apartment, he saw no problem with leading the House charge against Clinton for having sex with an intern or, more directly, he saw no problem with not supporting family planning to avoid the likelihood of abortions. In his investigation of Planned Parenthood, the following exchange between Hyde and Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood Is documented:
"Ms. Feldt, does it trouble you that there are so many abortions?"
"Mr. Hyde, if it troubles you," I went off script to reply, "why have you never once voted for family planning services?" Moral superiority does not worry about trifles like doing something to reduce an evil. The morally superior merely need to point it out for the morally inferior to execute.
John Kyl on the Senate floor: “Well over ninety per cent of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions.” Followed by an explanation but not an apology (and not on the Senate floor): “It was not intended to be a factual statement.” (explanation via Lemon on CNN). Planned Parenthood indeed performs abortions along with myriad health support, especially for women. Abortions account for 3% of its activity and it sequesters its funding so that federal money is not used for abortions. Birth control and STD testing as well as general healthcare including breast exams and pap smear tests are made available to poor women. Ugh! Poor women. They are morally inferior to Senator Kyl, and it is not his job to actually reduce abortions. He is responsible to teach the greedy needy about morals. Maybe some of them have to steal to eat. Shame on them again. If they were good Christian women, they would be more patient and surely more submissive to their moral superiors.
Lest we think that this concept of moral superiority is restricted to controlling economically deprived women, consider the following excerpt from Bloomberg in December, 2010 that outlines the business dealings of a major American firm in Nigeria:
“Nigeria alleges the companies, which were part of group known as TSKJ, paid bribes totaling $180 million to Nigerian officials between 1994 and 2004 to win a $6 billion liquefied natural gas plant contract. KBR and Halliburton agreed to pay $579 million to U.S. authorities in February 2009 for bribery payments in Nigeria.” Dick Cheney was head of Halliburton/KBR when the bribery took place and he soon became Vice President of the US. Maybe that was a necessary business expense and if Halliburton paid taxes, surely it also used the $579 Million it paid to our government as a tax write-off. This illegal activity aided profiteering by Cheney, of course, but it also took opportunity from firms that were unwilling to bribe and from impoverished Nigerians who had no say or benefit in the distribution of their nation’s resources.
More recently, the Swedish Ikea Corporation has located a furniture factory in Danville, VA. State and local officials there gave Ikea free land and tax breaks to locate in the Right to Work for Less Commonwealth of Virginia. The starting salaries in Virginia are $8/hour without benefits, while the identical jobs in Sweden pay $19/hour with 3 weeks vacation and full medical benefits. While the cost of living may be lower in Danville, surely the cost of medical benefits is higher than zero. Be patient my Christians and don’t talk with the evil unions who surely will lead you to sin. Be patient, your time will come at the Last Judgment and remember that the Meek will inherit the earth. Therefore, be Meek and you shall inherit the earth (or what is left after the polluters are done). The lesson: Moral superiority means that I get my share now and you can wait until earth freezes over or trickle down works, whichever comes first. Does it matter that the moral superiority is imported or homegrown? Not really, since the Swedes could not have done this without American help.
The more I study our current situation and the Paul Ryan plan to have the poor finance the tax breaks for the wealthy the more I understand the logic of trickle down economics. By changing Medicare to voucher roulette for the poor who cannot afford supplemental insurance, two things happen; first, it is a windfall for healthcare insurance companies to enrich those that will still ration care (only now for paying for expenses like advertising and an unnecessary layer of administration) and, a perfect way to keep millions of Americans in poverty and ill health since a $15,000 annual voucher does nothing to reduce healthcare costs per se, but only reduce to the government budget. The tax breaks for the rich will help them pay for increasing medical expenses and the poor will die sooner thereby becoming eligible for inheriting the earth years earlier. You must look up to the morally superior. They certainly know their scripture and they are willing to give up inheritance of the earth as long as they don’t pay inheritance or any other taxes in this life. Just what is it that trickles down? I think that it is the blood, sweat, and tears of the poor, along with a little of their urine down their pants while they strain to await their inheritance coming in the next life. I guess that atheists will have to develop another theory of morality, justice and trickle down. I call this Moral Wrecktitude where misplaced morality wrecks the lives of the poor and the incredibly shrinking middle class and chills the hearts of the rich (along with their gin).
Peace,
George Giacoppe
18 April 2011
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Education Fraud
Are the pages turning
And is the children learning
As we argue the merit
Of the price of fine claret
Instead of the cost
Of a childhood lost
And the fairness of doctrine
That measures by testing
Our children like bovine
Re-chewing cud while festing
Education is the name and fraud is the game. I recently wrote of the scandalous action of the US Supreme Court in declaring child labor laws unconstitutional both in 1918 and again in 1935 to allow children “more freedom.” This Dickens era approach has recently been expanded by at least three of our states. Maine, Missouri and Utah have legislation pending to strip away the effectiveness of the federal law. The connection of child labor to education is a long and sometimes puzzling one. Horace Mann, way back in the 1840s, persuaded Massachusetts and a few other states to make public schooling mandatory and free to age 16. His theory was that schooling could develop citizens of knowledge and understanding so that they might provide more for themselves and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He felt that by combining the youth of different classes into the same classrooms that society as a whole would benefit and that it would not harm industry. He also wanted to keep kids off the streets where they might be incarcerated instead of educated. Mann traveled to Prussia on his own money to observe their public school system and selected that model for Massachusetts, so there was also a call for discipline and substance in schools. He also established “Normal Schools” that had the mission of educating teachers so that coherent and quality instruction was integral with the school system.
Contrast that with today’s schools that are becoming aimless footballs that bounce along at the whim of politicians trying to create social and economic engineering by toying with basic educational purposes and encouraging a concept of “individual responsibility” in education instead of “commonwealth,” or the common good of the state. That new political emphasis has taken schools from the hands of communities and placed them in state and federal hands. Funding has changed so that states and the federal government have created grants and rules for governance that are unrelated to quality. Foremost is the unfunded federal mandate for “No Child Left Behind.” That law has created an orgy of standardized testing beginning early in the K-12 system with an apparent purpose of grading teachers instead of measuring student progress. Measurement is not inherently evil, but using measurement as a club to punish teachers is counterproductive. Punishment has also generated cheating in most districts in order to avoid the punishment of systems and teachers by closing schools and removing federal monies.
I can recall conducting monthly audits of regional offices in a property casualty insurance company. The office being inspected would take a day or two to prepare for the audit; a day or two to undergo the audit and a day or two to document deficiencies and planned corrective actions. Usually, this resulted in 20 to 25% of available time being spent either in preparation, conduct or review of the audits. That is a waste of time when real work needs to be done and practically guarantees failure the following month. Similarly in our schools, in addition to outright cheating, “NCLB” has spawned a plethora of repetitious testing so that teachers and districts can avoid punitive measures. Like an overuse of audits, it is a waste of time. No real learning gets done. Educational returns diminish rapidly and students may understand that the testing itself is the purpose of school. Some politicians love it because they can then propose closing some schools and rewarding others that have not been caught cheating. More to the point, they can justify reducing budgets and promoting a voucher system where private and religious schools are compensated instead of fixing the problem in our public systems. This is equivalent to official government sabotage and it is often promoted by those who claim “government is the problem.” The concept of initiating official competition to “improve” schools assumes that schools are like opposing athletic teams instead of institutions designed to create a better commonwealth where we, as a nation, can compete using better prepared citizens who will create the future for our nation. It is a faulty assumption and it directly destroys learning instead of creating the climate for learning. It is also a form of class warfare where the wealthy can pay for better education and the poor are captive to an unwieldy system that is being sabotaged in the name of “freedom of choice.” Education becomes an expense instead of an investment. The results are both evident and catastrophic.
Ironically, we now have Charter Schools, school vouchers and repetitive testing that adds cost without benefit to our common good. Instead of focusing our resources on providing targeted assessment and education, we squander resources on vouchers and charter school experiments, wasteful testing that now needs auditing to protect us from cheating, and attacks on teachers including layoffs and their removal from collective bargaining. None of this attacks the problem of developing effective working citizens. Instead, it concentrates budgets further and further from the sources of solving the problems and it creates a workforce of minimum wage workers who must compete with imported labor and exported jobs. Budgets must be closer to the schools. Immediate cities and towns may need to be supplemented from state and federal funds, but the further government is from the problem, the less likely that local differences and needs will be understood. With this as a trend, then education will be only for the wealthy and the poor will be unprepared to compete for meaningful work. Indeed, it is in concert with Maine, Michigan and Utah moving to re-introduce child labor. Since 1980, when many families could live on a single income, the majority of families now require two or more incomes to survive. The total average wage gain in the last 30 years has been only $300 per person while productivity has soared and CEOs have multiplied their salaries and corporate profits have reached record levels. As G W Bush famously asked: “Is the children learning?” Perhaps that conservative’s question provides its own answer. Maybe we should put kids to work to compete with their parents for diminishing wages. The minimum wage can be lowered to solve the education problem. What a concept. No schools, no budget problems, no social movement and no threat from thinking people. Conservative Utopia.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
03 April 2011
And is the children learning
As we argue the merit
Of the price of fine claret
Instead of the cost
Of a childhood lost
And the fairness of doctrine
That measures by testing
Our children like bovine
Re-chewing cud while festing
Education is the name and fraud is the game. I recently wrote of the scandalous action of the US Supreme Court in declaring child labor laws unconstitutional both in 1918 and again in 1935 to allow children “more freedom.” This Dickens era approach has recently been expanded by at least three of our states. Maine, Missouri and Utah have legislation pending to strip away the effectiveness of the federal law. The connection of child labor to education is a long and sometimes puzzling one. Horace Mann, way back in the 1840s, persuaded Massachusetts and a few other states to make public schooling mandatory and free to age 16. His theory was that schooling could develop citizens of knowledge and understanding so that they might provide more for themselves and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He felt that by combining the youth of different classes into the same classrooms that society as a whole would benefit and that it would not harm industry. He also wanted to keep kids off the streets where they might be incarcerated instead of educated. Mann traveled to Prussia on his own money to observe their public school system and selected that model for Massachusetts, so there was also a call for discipline and substance in schools. He also established “Normal Schools” that had the mission of educating teachers so that coherent and quality instruction was integral with the school system.
Contrast that with today’s schools that are becoming aimless footballs that bounce along at the whim of politicians trying to create social and economic engineering by toying with basic educational purposes and encouraging a concept of “individual responsibility” in education instead of “commonwealth,” or the common good of the state. That new political emphasis has taken schools from the hands of communities and placed them in state and federal hands. Funding has changed so that states and the federal government have created grants and rules for governance that are unrelated to quality. Foremost is the unfunded federal mandate for “No Child Left Behind.” That law has created an orgy of standardized testing beginning early in the K-12 system with an apparent purpose of grading teachers instead of measuring student progress. Measurement is not inherently evil, but using measurement as a club to punish teachers is counterproductive. Punishment has also generated cheating in most districts in order to avoid the punishment of systems and teachers by closing schools and removing federal monies.
I can recall conducting monthly audits of regional offices in a property casualty insurance company. The office being inspected would take a day or two to prepare for the audit; a day or two to undergo the audit and a day or two to document deficiencies and planned corrective actions. Usually, this resulted in 20 to 25% of available time being spent either in preparation, conduct or review of the audits. That is a waste of time when real work needs to be done and practically guarantees failure the following month. Similarly in our schools, in addition to outright cheating, “NCLB” has spawned a plethora of repetitious testing so that teachers and districts can avoid punitive measures. Like an overuse of audits, it is a waste of time. No real learning gets done. Educational returns diminish rapidly and students may understand that the testing itself is the purpose of school. Some politicians love it because they can then propose closing some schools and rewarding others that have not been caught cheating. More to the point, they can justify reducing budgets and promoting a voucher system where private and religious schools are compensated instead of fixing the problem in our public systems. This is equivalent to official government sabotage and it is often promoted by those who claim “government is the problem.” The concept of initiating official competition to “improve” schools assumes that schools are like opposing athletic teams instead of institutions designed to create a better commonwealth where we, as a nation, can compete using better prepared citizens who will create the future for our nation. It is a faulty assumption and it directly destroys learning instead of creating the climate for learning. It is also a form of class warfare where the wealthy can pay for better education and the poor are captive to an unwieldy system that is being sabotaged in the name of “freedom of choice.” Education becomes an expense instead of an investment. The results are both evident and catastrophic.
Ironically, we now have Charter Schools, school vouchers and repetitive testing that adds cost without benefit to our common good. Instead of focusing our resources on providing targeted assessment and education, we squander resources on vouchers and charter school experiments, wasteful testing that now needs auditing to protect us from cheating, and attacks on teachers including layoffs and their removal from collective bargaining. None of this attacks the problem of developing effective working citizens. Instead, it concentrates budgets further and further from the sources of solving the problems and it creates a workforce of minimum wage workers who must compete with imported labor and exported jobs. Budgets must be closer to the schools. Immediate cities and towns may need to be supplemented from state and federal funds, but the further government is from the problem, the less likely that local differences and needs will be understood. With this as a trend, then education will be only for the wealthy and the poor will be unprepared to compete for meaningful work. Indeed, it is in concert with Maine, Michigan and Utah moving to re-introduce child labor. Since 1980, when many families could live on a single income, the majority of families now require two or more incomes to survive. The total average wage gain in the last 30 years has been only $300 per person while productivity has soared and CEOs have multiplied their salaries and corporate profits have reached record levels. As G W Bush famously asked: “Is the children learning?” Perhaps that conservative’s question provides its own answer. Maybe we should put kids to work to compete with their parents for diminishing wages. The minimum wage can be lowered to solve the education problem. What a concept. No schools, no budget problems, no social movement and no threat from thinking people. Conservative Utopia.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
03 April 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
The Billionaire Behind the Hate
That would be the brothers Koch (pron. Kock?), Charles and David. The bros have come into prominence since the rise of the Tea Party, which they direct and supply most of the money for. Staunch Libertarians, which party they also pretty much underwrite, their aim has long been to tear the government “out at the root.” As Jane Mayer in her brilliant article about these dogs in a recent New Yorker article (“Covert Operations,” Aug. 30, 2010) notes, the Libertarian Party platform in 1980, with David Koch on the ticket, advocated abolishing the SEC and the Department of Energy, as well as Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control and all income taxes (especially corporate income taxes). What’s alarming is not only the scope of this “anarcho-totalitarianism” (William Buckley’s term), but the fact that so much of it is beginning to come true. And Koch brothers’ money is part of the reason. That’s because they have oodles of it (ca $35 billion), originally coming from the oil-refining business started by their father, Fred Koch (he joined the John Birch Society in the 50s as one of the loonies who called Pres. Eisenhower a communist). It’s laughable, really. These guys give off the aura of that quintessential American culture hero, the self-made man. But what Mayer points out is that they didn’t exactly start on the level playing field they’re so fond of advocating. No. David Koch was left, upon his father’s death, the neat little sum of $300 million dollars! His other brothers no doubt inherited similar sums. Then David and his brother Charles (the CEO of Koch Industries) bought out their younger brother, and now own the family business lock, stock and barrel. That means no nosy stockholders. They are now nearly as rich as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, and a whole lot of that money goes to their political foundations. Between 1998 and 2008, according to Mayer, these are the donation figures—Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation: $48 million; Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation (controlled by Charlie): $28 million; David H. Koch Charitable Foundation: $120 million; plus $50 million in lobbying, and $8 million to political campaigns through KochPAC (more than 80% to Republicans). In 2010, Koch Industries led all other energy companies (including Exxon) in contributions to political campaigns. And just in case that weren’t enough clout, it was Koch money that in 1977 launched the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank (they have been prominent in attacking Global warming), and a bit later gave millions to another think tank, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University—“ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”
The activities of these “think” tanks would be laughable if they weren’t so perversely effective. Mayer cites a court case in 1997 when the EPA tried to reduce surface ozone pollution, much of it coming from oil refineries (the original Koch business, which has been sued constantly for polluting everything from air to ground water). One Susan Dudley, of the Mercatus Center, argued that the EPA had neglected to consider that “smog-free skies would result in more cases of skin cancer.” The Circuit Court actually believed this crap about smog being good, and ruled that, indeed, the EPA had “explicitly disregarded” the “possible health benefits of ozone.” The fact that the judges in the majority had attended “legal junkets” arranged by another group of Koch foundations, allegedly did not affect the ruling.
You get the picture. Big money buys big results, and the Koch brothers have big money they are quite willing and eager to spend. Another of their spin-off groups (this one designed to inspire and direct the grass roots activism the Tea Party is famous for) is named Americans for Prosperity (all of these names are a lesson in Orwellian language.) Minutely managed by the Kochs, Americans for Prosperity has been a key player in attacking the Obama presidency. That great conservative strategist, Grover Norquist, admitted to Mayer that the rowdy rallies by activists in the summer of 2010 were key to “undermining Obama’s agenda.” The people in the streets gave Republican lawmakers the cover they needed to refuse any cooperation with Obama, and changed the thinking of corporate donors. Prior to the demonstrations, even the Chamber of Commerce had been willing to work with the president; after the loonies took to the streets and “terrorized” Congress, this attitude changed.
There is much more to find out about these latter-day bagmen (their bought-out brother recently called their operation an “organized crime” operation because of their history of stealing oil from under Native American reservations—see Reader Supported News, March 20, 2011: “Koch and Native-American Reservation Oil Theft”), and I would recommend Mayer’s article as indispensable. It’s not just that David Koch is the guy who financed Governor Scott Walker’s election, and no doubt had a say in his recent anti-union legislation in Wisconsin; the Kochs also have bought numerous companies to supplement and diversify their oil-refining business, so the stink of their corruption is everywhere. Here’s a partial list of mostly paper products that they now control, sent to me by Eleanor Walden:
Paper products from Georgia-Pacific, including: Angel Soft toilet paper; Brawny paper towels; Dixie plates, bowls, napkins and cups; Mardi Gras napkins and towels; Quilted Northern toilet paper; Soft 'n Gentle toilet paper; Sparkle napkins; Vanity fair napkins; and Zee napkins. There’s a national campaign to boycott all of these products. I would urge everyone to do so, because if there’s one place these guys can be hurt, it’s in their deep, dirty pockets. (Related addendum: a March 14 article in Yahoo news noted that U.S. millionaires in a survey complained that even $7 million was not quite enough to feel rich. The poor guys compare themselves to their fellow princelings, and also worry a lot about outliving their meager assets. Doesn’t your heart just bleed for them?)
Lawrence DiStasi
The activities of these “think” tanks would be laughable if they weren’t so perversely effective. Mayer cites a court case in 1997 when the EPA tried to reduce surface ozone pollution, much of it coming from oil refineries (the original Koch business, which has been sued constantly for polluting everything from air to ground water). One Susan Dudley, of the Mercatus Center, argued that the EPA had neglected to consider that “smog-free skies would result in more cases of skin cancer.” The Circuit Court actually believed this crap about smog being good, and ruled that, indeed, the EPA had “explicitly disregarded” the “possible health benefits of ozone.” The fact that the judges in the majority had attended “legal junkets” arranged by another group of Koch foundations, allegedly did not affect the ruling.
You get the picture. Big money buys big results, and the Koch brothers have big money they are quite willing and eager to spend. Another of their spin-off groups (this one designed to inspire and direct the grass roots activism the Tea Party is famous for) is named Americans for Prosperity (all of these names are a lesson in Orwellian language.) Minutely managed by the Kochs, Americans for Prosperity has been a key player in attacking the Obama presidency. That great conservative strategist, Grover Norquist, admitted to Mayer that the rowdy rallies by activists in the summer of 2010 were key to “undermining Obama’s agenda.” The people in the streets gave Republican lawmakers the cover they needed to refuse any cooperation with Obama, and changed the thinking of corporate donors. Prior to the demonstrations, even the Chamber of Commerce had been willing to work with the president; after the loonies took to the streets and “terrorized” Congress, this attitude changed.
There is much more to find out about these latter-day bagmen (their bought-out brother recently called their operation an “organized crime” operation because of their history of stealing oil from under Native American reservations—see Reader Supported News, March 20, 2011: “Koch and Native-American Reservation Oil Theft”), and I would recommend Mayer’s article as indispensable. It’s not just that David Koch is the guy who financed Governor Scott Walker’s election, and no doubt had a say in his recent anti-union legislation in Wisconsin; the Kochs also have bought numerous companies to supplement and diversify their oil-refining business, so the stink of their corruption is everywhere. Here’s a partial list of mostly paper products that they now control, sent to me by Eleanor Walden:
Paper products from Georgia-Pacific, including: Angel Soft toilet paper; Brawny paper towels; Dixie plates, bowls, napkins and cups; Mardi Gras napkins and towels; Quilted Northern toilet paper; Soft 'n Gentle toilet paper; Sparkle napkins; Vanity fair napkins; and Zee napkins. There’s a national campaign to boycott all of these products. I would urge everyone to do so, because if there’s one place these guys can be hurt, it’s in their deep, dirty pockets. (Related addendum: a March 14 article in Yahoo news noted that U.S. millionaires in a survey complained that even $7 million was not quite enough to feel rich. The poor guys compare themselves to their fellow princelings, and also worry a lot about outliving their meager assets. Doesn’t your heart just bleed for them?)
Lawrence DiStasi
GE: No Tax Special
If I hadn’t just read it, I’d never believe it. G.E.—you remember, the company Ronald Reagan used to shill for; the company that built many of the nuclear reactors now under suspicion; the company whose CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was recently appointed by President Obama to be his liaison to the business community, as well as to head up the President’s “Committee on Jobs and Competitiveness” (slated to discuss corporate tax policy, the Pres. says, so as to LOWER the corporate tax rate)—last year “reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion,” $5.1 billion of which came from its U.S. operations. And its American tax bill? ZERO. No tax paid. “In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion,” writes David Kocieniewski in the 3/25/11 New York Times.
How can this be? you might ask. The government is crying about its indebtedness. Republicans and even Democrats are calling for austerity—i.e. cutting spending, i.e. cutting the benefits to the neediest members of our society, with plans to cut even more. And one of the richest corporations in America is paying NO TAX? Could it be that America doesn’t have a spending problem, that it has an INCOME problem because the richest individuals and corporations are paying less and less each year??? Do you think? Listen to what Kocieniewski writes, after recounting how G.E. spends a fortune in lobbying ($200 million over the last decade), and on a G.E. tax department headed by former IRS employees and lawyers numbering no less than 975 individuals! who do nothing but work on how to take advantage of tax breaks so that G.E. pays NO taxes:
Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.
Did you get that? Corporations—the alleged lifeblood of our economy, the ones who were just given permission, as PERSONS, to contribute unlimited amounts to political campaigns—not long ago paid nearly a third of the U.S. tax burden, but now pay less than a tenth and may soon pay less than a twentieth.
Ah but, they keep saying, we need to be competitive. What’s good for us is good for America and American workers. Oh really? Here’s the truth:
Since 2003, the company has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the United States, while increasing overseas employment. In that time, G.E.’s accumulated offshore profits have risen to $92 billion from $15 billion.
And what does earning all that money overseas do for G.E.? Well several things. This is because the other big change in G.E.’s business has been a shift from producing goods (like lightbulbs and all the “good things G.E. brings to life”) to providing financing for its products. “GE Capital” is the name of this finance division and more than half of G.E.’s profit recently has come from financing. Then the company managed to muscle changes in the tax laws that allow multinationals “to avoid taxes on some kinds of banking and insurance income.” This is known as “active financing.” It means that “if G.E. financed the sale of a jet engine or generator in Ireland, for example, the company would no longer have to pay American tax on the interest income as long as the profits remained offshore.” G.E. has been diligent in doing this, that is, booking a huge percentage of its profits in low-tax countries like Ireland and Singapore and keeping them there, a practice that, according to one tax economist, has “allowed G.E. to bring its U.S. effective tax rate to rock-bottom levels.” In the past year, in fact, to ZERO. No, less than zero, because it got a benefit of $3.2 billion!
So, in effect, G.E. has said to the United States and its people: “fuck you.” It manufactures more and more of its goods abroad, thus destroying American jobs, makes and keeps its profits abroad, and then gets tax benefits for all this that are applied to the little tax obligation (from goods still manufactured in the U.S.) it hasn’t found a loophole to worm its way out of. G.E. explains this by saying it has an obligation to its shareholders to “legally minimize its costs.” Some would call it more like “corporate welfare” (I would call it corporate thievery.) And what I’m wondering is, How is it that Americans who can barely buy food are pilloried as “welfare queens,” and made to work for their benefits, while these big time welfare queens get lionized, deferred to in every way, and even appointed to the President’s inner circle of advisers?
It’s called corruption, folks, and because of it the United States is looking more and more like one of those banana republics we used to laugh at in the old days, but no more. And if there’s a question left, it can only be: how long can such wanton pillaging of a nation go on? The answer is simple: as long as we the people let it.
Lawrence DiStasi
How can this be? you might ask. The government is crying about its indebtedness. Republicans and even Democrats are calling for austerity—i.e. cutting spending, i.e. cutting the benefits to the neediest members of our society, with plans to cut even more. And one of the richest corporations in America is paying NO TAX? Could it be that America doesn’t have a spending problem, that it has an INCOME problem because the richest individuals and corporations are paying less and less each year??? Do you think? Listen to what Kocieniewski writes, after recounting how G.E. spends a fortune in lobbying ($200 million over the last decade), and on a G.E. tax department headed by former IRS employees and lawyers numbering no less than 975 individuals! who do nothing but work on how to take advantage of tax breaks so that G.E. pays NO taxes:
Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.
Did you get that? Corporations—the alleged lifeblood of our economy, the ones who were just given permission, as PERSONS, to contribute unlimited amounts to political campaigns—not long ago paid nearly a third of the U.S. tax burden, but now pay less than a tenth and may soon pay less than a twentieth.
Ah but, they keep saying, we need to be competitive. What’s good for us is good for America and American workers. Oh really? Here’s the truth:
Since 2003, the company has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the United States, while increasing overseas employment. In that time, G.E.’s accumulated offshore profits have risen to $92 billion from $15 billion.
And what does earning all that money overseas do for G.E.? Well several things. This is because the other big change in G.E.’s business has been a shift from producing goods (like lightbulbs and all the “good things G.E. brings to life”) to providing financing for its products. “GE Capital” is the name of this finance division and more than half of G.E.’s profit recently has come from financing. Then the company managed to muscle changes in the tax laws that allow multinationals “to avoid taxes on some kinds of banking and insurance income.” This is known as “active financing.” It means that “if G.E. financed the sale of a jet engine or generator in Ireland, for example, the company would no longer have to pay American tax on the interest income as long as the profits remained offshore.” G.E. has been diligent in doing this, that is, booking a huge percentage of its profits in low-tax countries like Ireland and Singapore and keeping them there, a practice that, according to one tax economist, has “allowed G.E. to bring its U.S. effective tax rate to rock-bottom levels.” In the past year, in fact, to ZERO. No, less than zero, because it got a benefit of $3.2 billion!
So, in effect, G.E. has said to the United States and its people: “fuck you.” It manufactures more and more of its goods abroad, thus destroying American jobs, makes and keeps its profits abroad, and then gets tax benefits for all this that are applied to the little tax obligation (from goods still manufactured in the U.S.) it hasn’t found a loophole to worm its way out of. G.E. explains this by saying it has an obligation to its shareholders to “legally minimize its costs.” Some would call it more like “corporate welfare” (I would call it corporate thievery.) And what I’m wondering is, How is it that Americans who can barely buy food are pilloried as “welfare queens,” and made to work for their benefits, while these big time welfare queens get lionized, deferred to in every way, and even appointed to the President’s inner circle of advisers?
It’s called corruption, folks, and because of it the United States is looking more and more like one of those banana republics we used to laugh at in the old days, but no more. And if there’s a question left, it can only be: how long can such wanton pillaging of a nation go on? The answer is simple: as long as we the people let it.
Lawrence DiStasi
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Nuclear Reactors: Full Speed Ahead
Amid all the horrors engulfing Japan (and the rest of the world as it watches in fear and trembling) not only via the earthquake and tsunami, but also via the possibility, increasing hourly, of one or more nuclear meltdowns, it is “encouraging” to note that some intrepid Americans are undaunted. Today, for example, that great representative from Texas, Joe Barton, was badgering Energy Secretary Stephen Chu in a hearing before his Energy and Commerce Committee. Barton—who some may remember as the “bright light” who apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward: “I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is again in my words amounts to a ‘shakedown’ so I apologize” (seriously, those are the words he used) and who, it was later revealed, has received some $1,330,160 in “oil money” during his career—kept asking Chu if the Obama administration’s earlier promise to push for the building of more nuclear plants in the U.S. by providing loan guarantees of $56 billion still held. Chu answered in a complex way, and Barton persisted: “Is that a “yes?” Chu danced a bit more, but then answered, “Yes.” Barton then asked a further question amounting to the same thing, and this time got a prompt “Yes” from Chu. “Ah, you’re learning,” chortled the chairman; for he had the answer he wanted. The United States was not going to be deterred by a little meltdown in Japan, or by the rising panic among the world’s peoples about all the nuclear power plants that could spew radiation in unforeseeable directions due to unforeseeable accidents, or the minor problem of what to do with all that spent fuel lasting millennia. Hell no! Energy is needed, plutonium is needed, and real men like Barton aren’t afraid of what a little radiation does to the human body (nor, it seems, is the Obama administration), so it’s full speed ahead.
So here we are. The Japanese are running out of options to cool down these out-of-control nuclear reactors. They’ve been pumping sea water, probably using fire trucks in tandem to get enough pressure to pump the water onto the fuel rods, or replace the evaporating water from the pools storing spent rods still generating radioactive materials and heat, but they’re running out of fuel to keep the fire engines running. Worse, they’ve just this morning had to allow the skeleton crew (no pun intended) of 50 workers or so to take a break because the radiation levels were getting too high even for these sacrificial lambs. Meantime, the temperature in these reactors keeps rising inexorably. 2500 degrees. 3000 degrees. It’s hell on earth.
Herein lies the crux of the matter. Nuclear fission creates heat. So does just the normal process of radioactive decay of the materials that are used in the fuel rods (i.e. even after the reactor is shut down). The geniuses who designed this technology figured that all they’d have to do was keep the process cool with water. Keep circulating water to cool the fuel rods and all would be fine. But all isn’t fine. Electricity to pump the water fails. Generators to replace the electricity are stored in the basement and a tsunami floods the basement and disables the generators. Then sea water gets pumped in, but that also has its limits. Helicopters are called in to dump sea water into the blown-apart reactors (the explosion caused by the steam created by water on hot rods, and the release of hydrogen which blows up), but the radiation is too high for the helicopter pilots to fly over the reactors. In short, the breakdown and remedial measures amount to a chain reaction that mimics the chain reaction that creates nuclear energy (and bombs) in the first place.
This hellish, impossible-to-control technology is the reason that governments, like the Obama administration, have to guarantee the loans needed to build these reactors. Investors on Wall Street want no part of this stuff. Banks won’t take the risk on their own. And why? Because the whole process is too hazardous, too fraught with potential disasters: Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; and now Fukushima. So whose money is going to fill the gap? Why, yours and mine, courtesy of the United States government, which pledges that if anything goes wrong (and how could it not go wrong eventually?), the federal government will pay off whatever loans or costs have accrued. And they are huge. Because though it seems “free,” this is expensive technology. And the only entity willing to take the risk by subsidizing it is the government. Reminds us of that other huge risk the government provides welfare checks for: war, the insanely expensive machines of war.
But will the world backtrack from its insane nuclear gamble? Hell no. We need war; we need energy. And so we get Joe Barton, that dimwit who considers global warming natural,
I believe that Earth’s climate is changing, but I think it’s changing for natural reasons. And I think mankind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the Earth…Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is.
Global warming? Just adapt, says Joe. Nuclear meltdowns? Just adapt. And the Obama administration, in the face of pressure from the likes of Barton, has to demonstrate its courage even in the face of planetary disaster. It’s what we elect these big boys for, after all: Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.
Lawrence DiStasi
=
So here we are. The Japanese are running out of options to cool down these out-of-control nuclear reactors. They’ve been pumping sea water, probably using fire trucks in tandem to get enough pressure to pump the water onto the fuel rods, or replace the evaporating water from the pools storing spent rods still generating radioactive materials and heat, but they’re running out of fuel to keep the fire engines running. Worse, they’ve just this morning had to allow the skeleton crew (no pun intended) of 50 workers or so to take a break because the radiation levels were getting too high even for these sacrificial lambs. Meantime, the temperature in these reactors keeps rising inexorably. 2500 degrees. 3000 degrees. It’s hell on earth.
Herein lies the crux of the matter. Nuclear fission creates heat. So does just the normal process of radioactive decay of the materials that are used in the fuel rods (i.e. even after the reactor is shut down). The geniuses who designed this technology figured that all they’d have to do was keep the process cool with water. Keep circulating water to cool the fuel rods and all would be fine. But all isn’t fine. Electricity to pump the water fails. Generators to replace the electricity are stored in the basement and a tsunami floods the basement and disables the generators. Then sea water gets pumped in, but that also has its limits. Helicopters are called in to dump sea water into the blown-apart reactors (the explosion caused by the steam created by water on hot rods, and the release of hydrogen which blows up), but the radiation is too high for the helicopter pilots to fly over the reactors. In short, the breakdown and remedial measures amount to a chain reaction that mimics the chain reaction that creates nuclear energy (and bombs) in the first place.
This hellish, impossible-to-control technology is the reason that governments, like the Obama administration, have to guarantee the loans needed to build these reactors. Investors on Wall Street want no part of this stuff. Banks won’t take the risk on their own. And why? Because the whole process is too hazardous, too fraught with potential disasters: Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; and now Fukushima. So whose money is going to fill the gap? Why, yours and mine, courtesy of the United States government, which pledges that if anything goes wrong (and how could it not go wrong eventually?), the federal government will pay off whatever loans or costs have accrued. And they are huge. Because though it seems “free,” this is expensive technology. And the only entity willing to take the risk by subsidizing it is the government. Reminds us of that other huge risk the government provides welfare checks for: war, the insanely expensive machines of war.
But will the world backtrack from its insane nuclear gamble? Hell no. We need war; we need energy. And so we get Joe Barton, that dimwit who considers global warming natural,
I believe that Earth’s climate is changing, but I think it’s changing for natural reasons. And I think mankind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the Earth…Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is.
Global warming? Just adapt, says Joe. Nuclear meltdowns? Just adapt. And the Obama administration, in the face of pressure from the likes of Barton, has to demonstrate its courage even in the face of planetary disaster. It’s what we elect these big boys for, after all: Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.
Lawrence DiStasi
=
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Forget Shame
As I watched Michael Moore deliver a white hot speech in Wisconsin a few days ago, and heard the voices of his audience—state workers protesting the concerted Republican assault on public sector unions by yelling “Shame! Shame! Shame!”—it occurred to me. This time, folks, shaming those in power isn’t going to be enough. Though it was enough to bring down two presidents—Johnson and Nixon—in the 60s and 70s, and to eventually stop the Vietnam War, it won’t make even a dent in the armor worn by today’s ruling class. I mean, just think of it: two short years ago, the country seemed so disgusted by the overt criminality of Bush and his gang in the White House that his name was too toxic to even mention. The entire Republican Party was said to be near extinction, while a Prince of the Left had been elected to the White House. And yet, today that same prince is in retreat on every front, groveling before the right, while the worst yahoos ever seen in public office are screaming for the blood of gliberals and their devastated constituency. So we can forget tears, forget revulsion about war, murder, the evisceration of the social net so laboriously put in place over several generations, the enslavement of the newly impoverished, and all the rest. The power mongers and their lackeys in office are simply not susceptible to these common human emotions. Like their forebears in the Germany of the 1930s, they seem to rather enjoy the suffering of those beneath their boot heels. And they’ll do anything, from dirty tricks to the crippling and/or poisoning of workers, to the poisoning of the entire planet, to protect what they view as “theirs.” Hence, we have this so-called Representative from New York, Peter King, our era’s Joe McCarthy, opening hearings on the “radicalization of the Muslim-American community by Al-Qaeda,” impervious to the tears of Congressman Ellison testifying about the sacrifice of one of these “terrorists” who died trying to save his fellow Americans on 9/11, and begging for the hearings to focus on a wider population than this already terrorized minority. And we have this punk governor of Wisconsin along with his newly-empowered Republican majority, ramming through in secret, when he couldn’t persuade by reason, the bill to strip unionized state employees of their collective bargaining rights. Shame? This crude piece of plastic doesn’t even register the stuff in whatever constitutes his innards. All he registers is the coin he gets from the likes of David Koch, the energy baron who’s the largest funder of anti-global-warming science in the world (even larger than Exxon) and the main bankroller of the Tea Party. I haven’t been able to find out if Koch is involved in ‘hydrofracking,’ the latest darling of energy bandits—see the NY Times, Feb. 27, for information on what ‘horizontal hydraulic fracturing’ does to the huge volume of water needed to “frack” the natural gas out of rock, and the corrosive salts, carcinogens, and yes radioactive elements like radium polluting that water when it drains into nearby rivers and aquifers used for drinking—but I wouldn’t be surprised.
So here’s what we’re up against now. These billionaires who brought the country to its knees and emerged richer than ever have now been given even greater power to control politicians and laws than they had during the Gilded Age. The gap between them and the rest of us has grown in the last thirty years—since that corporate shill Ronald Reagan began his assault on graduated income taxes and regulations keeping the corporate rape of the rest of us within some bounds—to a level of inequality in the distribution of wealth and power that rivals Arab sheikdoms. A few of these mandarins control more wealth than whole counties, whole states, whole regions of us. And they will do anything, corrupt any politician, commit any crime, decimate whole countries, whole planets, to keep it.
Shame them? It doesn’t even merit discussion. The only thing that impresses these robots is force. The force of millions of people screaming for their heads. The force of organized and constant pressure outing them and their crimes. The public employees in Wisconsin have begun this movement. So have a few thousands in states like Michigan and Indiana, where similar bills have been passed or are pending. But it is quite clear from the Wisconsin experience that more, far more, is going to be needed. There’s going to have to be not just a few victories over crumbs; a few compromises like “carbon trading” and extended unemployment; there’s going to have to be systemic change. And as far as I can see, that’s not going to happen unless these bastards are made to fear not only for their fortunes, but for their very existence. How is this to happen? I have no specific solutions; besides, it’s a project for the young. But as Michael Moore pointed out in Wisconsin, and as the people always seem to forget: there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. That’s what terrifies them in the night. They know that if the people ever wake up, if the people ever become conscious of their power and use it, the game, the game whereby the corporate pooh-bahs have not only seized obscene amounts of wealth and power, but used it to exploit and blight everything that makes life itself possible, is over.
I’m putting my money on an awakening. But it had better happen soon, because the damage is accelerating so fast that before long there won’t be much left to save.
Lawrence DiStasi
So here’s what we’re up against now. These billionaires who brought the country to its knees and emerged richer than ever have now been given even greater power to control politicians and laws than they had during the Gilded Age. The gap between them and the rest of us has grown in the last thirty years—since that corporate shill Ronald Reagan began his assault on graduated income taxes and regulations keeping the corporate rape of the rest of us within some bounds—to a level of inequality in the distribution of wealth and power that rivals Arab sheikdoms. A few of these mandarins control more wealth than whole counties, whole states, whole regions of us. And they will do anything, corrupt any politician, commit any crime, decimate whole countries, whole planets, to keep it.
Shame them? It doesn’t even merit discussion. The only thing that impresses these robots is force. The force of millions of people screaming for their heads. The force of organized and constant pressure outing them and their crimes. The public employees in Wisconsin have begun this movement. So have a few thousands in states like Michigan and Indiana, where similar bills have been passed or are pending. But it is quite clear from the Wisconsin experience that more, far more, is going to be needed. There’s going to have to be not just a few victories over crumbs; a few compromises like “carbon trading” and extended unemployment; there’s going to have to be systemic change. And as far as I can see, that’s not going to happen unless these bastards are made to fear not only for their fortunes, but for their very existence. How is this to happen? I have no specific solutions; besides, it’s a project for the young. But as Michael Moore pointed out in Wisconsin, and as the people always seem to forget: there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. That’s what terrifies them in the night. They know that if the people ever wake up, if the people ever become conscious of their power and use it, the game, the game whereby the corporate pooh-bahs have not only seized obscene amounts of wealth and power, but used it to exploit and blight everything that makes life itself possible, is over.
I’m putting my money on an awakening. But it had better happen soon, because the damage is accelerating so fast that before long there won’t be much left to save.
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
The Illusion of Control
Yesterday I was observing someone playing with a new iPad, waxing enthusiastic about how great it was. And in fact, the graphics are gorgeous, the screen luminous, the applications almost endless and endlessly powerful. You can have your favorite music on the thing, your favorite photos, your favorite books on its super reader, your favorite blogs constantly updated, and all of it available at the literal touch of your finger as it scrolls effortlessly through your increasingly digitized world. Fully loaded, it knows all kinds of things about you, including when you need to enter data, whereupon it automatically displays a keyboard on your screen.
And as I mulled about this later, and about the marvelous control offered by iPhones and iPods and all the other gadgets beguiling each of us with constantly-updated information geared specifically to ME, this notion of ‘the world at your fingertips’ started to appear in a slightly different light. My music, my websites, my blogs, my photos, my world—it’s all about some postmodern illusion that if I can just buy enough gadgets, I can inhabit a world that is tailor-made for me alone. I don’t have to wait for a radio to play my favorite song: I can have it and all my other favorites on my iPod/Phone/Pad. I needn’t listen to other crap—other songs, traffic, bird calls, jabbering other people, construction noise--ever again. Plugged in, I can control my sound environment, and then my visual environment, and my information environment, and everything else in my world.
And yes, it’s an illusion. And the question always is, who—and I can be sure it’s not only me—benefits from this illusion of control. Who gains from my thinking that I can actually, and for an increasingly affordable price, control my world? Well, how about the mandarins who actually do control the world? How about the corporate masters who have, in the last 30 or 40 years, increased by geometric leaps and bounds their share of the wealth of not just this country but the entire world? It’s a bit like bread and circuses in ancient Rome: If the plebes can be given entertainments that are gripping enough (and the slaughter of a few Christians, or gladiators, or lions is quite tolerable for this), then they’re less likely to demand a real life. In our world, it’s bread and circuses as well—the Super Bowl and all sporting events, the Academy Awards and all contests, stupid sitcoms and countless murder-and-mayhem cop shows to keep everyone at home and off the streets—but increasingly now, it’s our gadgets. If the plebes can be sold the illusion of control, they won’t notice that they have no control at all. Democracy? A joke. No matter who’s in power, money talks. Not votes. Money. Those with it get more powerful, those without it get the illusion of power via more and more gigabytes, greater capacity to find a new restaurant via GPS, and even the occasional ‘opportunity’ to cast a meaningless vote or two.
Lest one think that this illusion of control is peculiar to our age, it’s important to see that the illusion goes deeper than iPads. Or rather, the human urge to get control does. If one thinks about it, all of civilization constitutes an attempt to assert control over the constantly changing vicissitudes of life. Humans invent fire to control it, to warm themselves with it, to frighten threatening animals with it, to cook with it. Levi Strauss made a great deal of this, of cooking, drawing an elementary distinction between the raw and the cooked. Those who eat things raw are animals; primitive life forms. Those who cook are the civilized ones. Cooking not only makes food more digestible, it sets up the basic distinction upon which civilization is built: raw vs. cooked. And it leads to other distinctions: tame vs. wild, agriculture vs. hunting/gathering; protection from the elements vs. exposure to them. And it is all a question of control, of controlling the environment, making it habitable no matter the weather or the availability of wild food, no matter the gods who control such things. And of course, this level of control can be extended almost infinitely: control of weather, control of travel, control of life itself in its most fundamental code, the gene.
More deeply still, the very symbol of humanity, conscious thought, if introspected, can be viewed in this light as well. Those who meditate find this out very quickly. The mind is an inexhaustible thought machine. Consciousness, or what we think of as consciousness, is almost totally consumed with a continuous train of thoughts: thoughts about what we shall do later, thoughts about what we have done earlier, thoughts about how we can prevent this event from going bad or get even with the one who made that event go bad, thoughts about how to best control the situations that are coming and/or edit the past dramas we’d like to change. Very little time is spent, under normal circumstances, attending to what is happening now. The actual conditions of this moment. And the illusion is that as long as I—what I consider to be my basic self, which is this conscious self thinking and apparently controlling my story—am engaged in this sort of thinking and controlling what I see and feel and am, then “I” am in control. And of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The conscious “I” controls very little in life. Most of what we perceive, and most of what we make decisions about, is perceived and decided upon long before the conscious self appears to resolve it. Milliseconds before I choose to go get a snack from the frig, the impulse has already been set in motion in stomach and brain. Well before I think to go chat up that lady, interior impulses have already impelled me to do so. So where Descartes famously concluded that “I think, therefore I am,” a galaxy of information indicates that human being is controlled at a considerable remove from conscious thought. This is not to say that the illusion of control afforded by such ‘thinking’ can’t be useful and even necessary. Imagining that we are in control has undeniably beneficial effects, especially for those who have grown up in chaotic environments where the feeling of chaos and lack of control can be deeply debilitating. But as an exclusive diet, as a controlling illusion, it leads us to all the ills to which humans are subject. As Stephen Asma notes in a recent book (Why I Am a Buddhist), the desire to be a self in control is the fundamental problem: “Once we give up on this exaggerated delusion of control, we attain some degree of liberation—we stop trying to own everything; this is my experience, this is mine, this is I, this is myself.”
Nor do we have to buy into the Buddhist idea of liberation to see that the illusion of control, the desire for control over all life has led humans into a serious dilemma. One aspect of it has already been noted: being deluded about our control, being diverted into meaningless forms of control, makes it easier for those who have ruthlessly grabbed power to maintain their power over us. A population busy with iPads or iPods is less likely to make trouble over the growing income gap. But even more serious consequences of this mania for control can be seen just as easily. Civilization and the “control” it provides humans has driven us to the edge of a cliff. In this ultimate sense, we have gained “control” over our environment—we use fossil fuel to power our lives; we use corporate agriculture to reduce the work necessary to feed more and more of us; we use scientific ingenuity to control our susceptibility to disease and even death--only to find that we are controlling ourselves into overpopulation, global warming from overuse of fossil fuels, and the feverish destruction of the critical varieties of plant and animal life we have evolved with and will, at some point, be unable to do without.
In this sense, control is a paradox: The more we control our planet, the more we lose what it provides us to survive. And we are all, without exception, susceptible to this; all of us, to one degree or another, ‘control freaks.’
So what to do? How control the mania to control?
If I knew, I wouldn’t have to write about it. But quite possibly it’s as simple as recognizing it in ourselves and others, and gradually letting go of the illusion. The fundamental truth is that life cannot be controlled. Life is defined by its uncontrollability (Interesting how word usage intuits this: the term “out of control” is now used as a superlative akin to “awesome”). The more we try, the unhappier we get. The more we try, the unhappier all other life gets as well. I’m reminded of George Carlin’s wonderful riff on “stuff.” We spend our lives trying to accumulate as much “stuff” as we can, as much stuff as our neighbors seem to have. And then as our apartments and houses and garages fill up with “stuff,” we have to find or buy new stuff to store all the useless stuff we’ve accumulated, and so have to keep accumulating ad infinitum, our lives reduced to the idiocy of getting and keeping and finding ways to store more and more until we are more controlled by our stuff than it is by us. Carlin made this funny. But the humor came from the fact that we all know how truly, sadly insane it is.
Lawrence DiStasi
And as I mulled about this later, and about the marvelous control offered by iPhones and iPods and all the other gadgets beguiling each of us with constantly-updated information geared specifically to ME, this notion of ‘the world at your fingertips’ started to appear in a slightly different light. My music, my websites, my blogs, my photos, my world—it’s all about some postmodern illusion that if I can just buy enough gadgets, I can inhabit a world that is tailor-made for me alone. I don’t have to wait for a radio to play my favorite song: I can have it and all my other favorites on my iPod/Phone/Pad. I needn’t listen to other crap—other songs, traffic, bird calls, jabbering other people, construction noise--ever again. Plugged in, I can control my sound environment, and then my visual environment, and my information environment, and everything else in my world.
And yes, it’s an illusion. And the question always is, who—and I can be sure it’s not only me—benefits from this illusion of control. Who gains from my thinking that I can actually, and for an increasingly affordable price, control my world? Well, how about the mandarins who actually do control the world? How about the corporate masters who have, in the last 30 or 40 years, increased by geometric leaps and bounds their share of the wealth of not just this country but the entire world? It’s a bit like bread and circuses in ancient Rome: If the plebes can be given entertainments that are gripping enough (and the slaughter of a few Christians, or gladiators, or lions is quite tolerable for this), then they’re less likely to demand a real life. In our world, it’s bread and circuses as well—the Super Bowl and all sporting events, the Academy Awards and all contests, stupid sitcoms and countless murder-and-mayhem cop shows to keep everyone at home and off the streets—but increasingly now, it’s our gadgets. If the plebes can be sold the illusion of control, they won’t notice that they have no control at all. Democracy? A joke. No matter who’s in power, money talks. Not votes. Money. Those with it get more powerful, those without it get the illusion of power via more and more gigabytes, greater capacity to find a new restaurant via GPS, and even the occasional ‘opportunity’ to cast a meaningless vote or two.
Lest one think that this illusion of control is peculiar to our age, it’s important to see that the illusion goes deeper than iPads. Or rather, the human urge to get control does. If one thinks about it, all of civilization constitutes an attempt to assert control over the constantly changing vicissitudes of life. Humans invent fire to control it, to warm themselves with it, to frighten threatening animals with it, to cook with it. Levi Strauss made a great deal of this, of cooking, drawing an elementary distinction between the raw and the cooked. Those who eat things raw are animals; primitive life forms. Those who cook are the civilized ones. Cooking not only makes food more digestible, it sets up the basic distinction upon which civilization is built: raw vs. cooked. And it leads to other distinctions: tame vs. wild, agriculture vs. hunting/gathering; protection from the elements vs. exposure to them. And it is all a question of control, of controlling the environment, making it habitable no matter the weather or the availability of wild food, no matter the gods who control such things. And of course, this level of control can be extended almost infinitely: control of weather, control of travel, control of life itself in its most fundamental code, the gene.
More deeply still, the very symbol of humanity, conscious thought, if introspected, can be viewed in this light as well. Those who meditate find this out very quickly. The mind is an inexhaustible thought machine. Consciousness, or what we think of as consciousness, is almost totally consumed with a continuous train of thoughts: thoughts about what we shall do later, thoughts about what we have done earlier, thoughts about how we can prevent this event from going bad or get even with the one who made that event go bad, thoughts about how to best control the situations that are coming and/or edit the past dramas we’d like to change. Very little time is spent, under normal circumstances, attending to what is happening now. The actual conditions of this moment. And the illusion is that as long as I—what I consider to be my basic self, which is this conscious self thinking and apparently controlling my story—am engaged in this sort of thinking and controlling what I see and feel and am, then “I” am in control. And of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The conscious “I” controls very little in life. Most of what we perceive, and most of what we make decisions about, is perceived and decided upon long before the conscious self appears to resolve it. Milliseconds before I choose to go get a snack from the frig, the impulse has already been set in motion in stomach and brain. Well before I think to go chat up that lady, interior impulses have already impelled me to do so. So where Descartes famously concluded that “I think, therefore I am,” a galaxy of information indicates that human being is controlled at a considerable remove from conscious thought. This is not to say that the illusion of control afforded by such ‘thinking’ can’t be useful and even necessary. Imagining that we are in control has undeniably beneficial effects, especially for those who have grown up in chaotic environments where the feeling of chaos and lack of control can be deeply debilitating. But as an exclusive diet, as a controlling illusion, it leads us to all the ills to which humans are subject. As Stephen Asma notes in a recent book (Why I Am a Buddhist), the desire to be a self in control is the fundamental problem: “Once we give up on this exaggerated delusion of control, we attain some degree of liberation—we stop trying to own everything; this is my experience, this is mine, this is I, this is myself.”
Nor do we have to buy into the Buddhist idea of liberation to see that the illusion of control, the desire for control over all life has led humans into a serious dilemma. One aspect of it has already been noted: being deluded about our control, being diverted into meaningless forms of control, makes it easier for those who have ruthlessly grabbed power to maintain their power over us. A population busy with iPads or iPods is less likely to make trouble over the growing income gap. But even more serious consequences of this mania for control can be seen just as easily. Civilization and the “control” it provides humans has driven us to the edge of a cliff. In this ultimate sense, we have gained “control” over our environment—we use fossil fuel to power our lives; we use corporate agriculture to reduce the work necessary to feed more and more of us; we use scientific ingenuity to control our susceptibility to disease and even death--only to find that we are controlling ourselves into overpopulation, global warming from overuse of fossil fuels, and the feverish destruction of the critical varieties of plant and animal life we have evolved with and will, at some point, be unable to do without.
In this sense, control is a paradox: The more we control our planet, the more we lose what it provides us to survive. And we are all, without exception, susceptible to this; all of us, to one degree or another, ‘control freaks.’
So what to do? How control the mania to control?
If I knew, I wouldn’t have to write about it. But quite possibly it’s as simple as recognizing it in ourselves and others, and gradually letting go of the illusion. The fundamental truth is that life cannot be controlled. Life is defined by its uncontrollability (Interesting how word usage intuits this: the term “out of control” is now used as a superlative akin to “awesome”). The more we try, the unhappier we get. The more we try, the unhappier all other life gets as well. I’m reminded of George Carlin’s wonderful riff on “stuff.” We spend our lives trying to accumulate as much “stuff” as we can, as much stuff as our neighbors seem to have. And then as our apartments and houses and garages fill up with “stuff,” we have to find or buy new stuff to store all the useless stuff we’ve accumulated, and so have to keep accumulating ad infinitum, our lives reduced to the idiocy of getting and keeping and finding ways to store more and more until we are more controlled by our stuff than it is by us. Carlin made this funny. But the humor came from the fact that we all know how truly, sadly insane it is.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, February 20, 2011
New Deal Redoux?
The amazing mobility of labor
Gave us all something to savor
Lifting oneself by the bootstraps
And closing society’s gaps
Work hard and stay clean!
And soon you rise on the scene
But far more than our mobility
Has been our inherent nobility
And world-class productivity
Of our mid-class working humanity
They work and they play
Full taxes they pay
Unlike the high and the mighty
Who use loopholes daily and nightly
The drama being played out in Madison, Wisconsin is being compared to the uprisings in Egypt. Wrong place. Wrong time. It should remind us of the heritage of our working middle class that was earned through the blood, sweat and tears of unions in the 1920s and 1930s. Conservatives of that time writhed in agony to witness the decline of Darwinian social politics and the rise of basic equality of opportunity in these United States. In the early days of the labor movement, state and even federal government sided with corporations to the point of brutal suppression of workers through gunfire and police batons. And the executive branch of government was not alone. Child labor laws enacted in 1916 restricted child labor to a minimum extent, however the Supreme Court overturned the Keating-Owens Child Labor Act of 1916 by their Hammer vs. Dagenhart decision in 1918 that encouraged exploitation of children in the workplace and as a ploy to maintain low wages. That remained a law of the land until 1933 when Congress again enacted legislation to restrict child labor. Again the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1935. Later, FDR signed into law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It was actually 1941 when a new Supreme Court finally affirmed FLSA as the law of the land and stopped the abuse. Only after 1938 were wages allowed to rise without interference from the Supreme Court and only through the concerted action of unions. Those of you who hold an image of the Supreme Court as wise and prudent interpreters of our laws need only review the history to see your error. Activist Supreme Court judges have ruled the bench for decades if not centuries. They supported corporations, not humans, and surely not children.
Were it not for unions, we would not today have the 40 hour work week nor the 8 hour work day. Safety in the workplace would be only at the will of the employer as in the days of the Manhattan garment workers fire in 1911 when 146 young women perished in a fire because the doors were locked. to keep them from taking breaks or leaving their work stations during their 72 hour work week. Management locked the doors to stairwells and women jumped to their deaths or burned in place. The International Garment Worker’s Union grew largely due to that fire. This is a time to remind the reader that unions were not some spontaneous expression of antagonism to management and corporations; they were instead caused by corporate and management abuse of power. Unions were an answer to capricious and arbitrary decisions about wages and working conditions. This was true in industry, in mining, in railroads and in all sectors of economic activity. At their peak in 1954, unions represented nearly 36% of American workers and had an influence that reached all economic sectors. It was about that time that corporate management and state governments felt that wages and, therefore, pensions had grown too large. As a result, “right to work” laws were enacted in many southern states. Quickly, textile and shoe and manufacturing corporations fled south where they got tax breaks, free land and other incentives to relocate their businesses. Unions shrank. In some “right to work” states the remaining unions were required to represent workers who paid no dues based on new laws. This was a blow both to union financing and to membership. Today, only about 7% of the private sector is unionized. Note that wages continued to fall without union protection and the flood of companies that surged into Alabama, the Carolinas and even Georgia and Tennessee did not stop their lower wage migration. They soon left to manufacture in Asia; first in Japan and then Taiwan and then Mainland China and even Vietnam and Malaysia. Once the cascade for lower wages begins, it becomes an unstoppable torrent that falls ever further to find the most depressed economies.
During this period, unions made concessions, perhaps in the hope of maintaining some of the jobs that were available and unions were characterized by corporations as the source of our economic problems. As a single example, the auto industry, notably GM, moved to “right to work” states to avoid unions. GM established Saturn in 1985, and it went out of business completely in 2010 without ever earning a single dollar profit in all the years it existed in Tennessee. GM had blamed unions for its woes when unsatisfactory leadership by CEO Roger Smith, unsatisfactory quality, especially in the early years, and competition with its other GM brands caused Saturn to fail. Failure had nothing to do with unions. Quality competition from Europe and Asia, where wages eventually became higher than American wages actually depressed GM sales along with other US automakers. Blame the unions? Boeing strove to kill unions with its 787 “Dreamliner” by outsourcing major components overseas. Result? Boeing is 3 years past due on delivery and billions over budget by not using their experienced union labor.
With the decline of union membership in US corporations, there came a nearly simultaneous, although mostly unrelated, growth in public sector unions. Once again, unions were caused and not a simultaneous expression of hatred for management. The largest single factor for public sector union growth was the simple fact that government jobs had been used as political capital for patronage and that workers had no control over being fired arbitrarily as a new party was swept into power. At the national level, civil service rules assisted workers to some extent, but that was reversed under GW Bush who wanted more freedom to “reward and punish performance” as he put the issue. In fact, patronage jobs went far deeper under GW Bush than any prior president. States quickly followed suit, except that unions were a stabilizing force that kept most workers on their jobs despite the political winds of change. That was good for both the workers and for people expecting continuity of quality public service despite varying election outcomes. The Bush model increased worker turbulance.
Fast forward to late 2007 and the continuing burden of a war of choice in Iraq and growing war efforts in Afghanistan and the collapse of the housing and lending industry due to malfeasance of corporate management and fundamental greed and…Poof! We have an unmatched fiscal and job crisis unseen since FDR’s days. Obviously, somebody should be punished for the widespread fraud and failure of our lending and our investment institutions. Pension funds, both individual and institutional, were devastated. Jobs were slashed. Balanced budgets became distant memories. Who can we punish? The perpetrators? Well, no. They are too big to fail. Let us get concessions from those who lost money in the pension funds and layoffs. Somebody has to pay. And so it came to pass that public sector unions and the real people who pay taxes were called upon to make new concessions. They did. Now if you can afford the tax accountants and attorneys to protect your income, you can still send your bonus dollars to the Grand Caymans for safekeeping.
Return to Wisconsin and Governor Scott Walker (bankrolled by Koch Industries) and you see the drama played out to bust unions and finally undo what FDR and unions wrought after years of fighting for some justice in treatment of labor. If unions are eliminated by this well financed conservative push, then you need to remember that it was unions that bargained collectively for each of us. I have never been a union member, but my pay was influenced by what unions derived at the table. Even in the Army, my pay was increased by what the postal workers were able to get through collective bargaining. If that is eliminated, then kiss goodbye to social and economic mobility as well as safety and stability. Bye to safety nets like public education, Social Security and Medicare. Say hello to the new robber barons and their conservative supporters who will finally undo the New Deal and present the Raw Deal. Unions, weak as they are, may be our last best hope to preserve education, dignity and mobility in these United States. We are moving from the justice of the people to the “just us” of the Oligarchs. Please speak up before it is too late. Maybe it is also time to impeach a few of the “Supremes” for conflict of interest.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
20 February 2011
Gave us all something to savor
Lifting oneself by the bootstraps
And closing society’s gaps
Work hard and stay clean!
And soon you rise on the scene
But far more than our mobility
Has been our inherent nobility
And world-class productivity
Of our mid-class working humanity
They work and they play
Full taxes they pay
Unlike the high and the mighty
Who use loopholes daily and nightly
The drama being played out in Madison, Wisconsin is being compared to the uprisings in Egypt. Wrong place. Wrong time. It should remind us of the heritage of our working middle class that was earned through the blood, sweat and tears of unions in the 1920s and 1930s. Conservatives of that time writhed in agony to witness the decline of Darwinian social politics and the rise of basic equality of opportunity in these United States. In the early days of the labor movement, state and even federal government sided with corporations to the point of brutal suppression of workers through gunfire and police batons. And the executive branch of government was not alone. Child labor laws enacted in 1916 restricted child labor to a minimum extent, however the Supreme Court overturned the Keating-Owens Child Labor Act of 1916 by their Hammer vs. Dagenhart decision in 1918 that encouraged exploitation of children in the workplace and as a ploy to maintain low wages. That remained a law of the land until 1933 when Congress again enacted legislation to restrict child labor. Again the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1935. Later, FDR signed into law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It was actually 1941 when a new Supreme Court finally affirmed FLSA as the law of the land and stopped the abuse. Only after 1938 were wages allowed to rise without interference from the Supreme Court and only through the concerted action of unions. Those of you who hold an image of the Supreme Court as wise and prudent interpreters of our laws need only review the history to see your error. Activist Supreme Court judges have ruled the bench for decades if not centuries. They supported corporations, not humans, and surely not children.
Were it not for unions, we would not today have the 40 hour work week nor the 8 hour work day. Safety in the workplace would be only at the will of the employer as in the days of the Manhattan garment workers fire in 1911 when 146 young women perished in a fire because the doors were locked. to keep them from taking breaks or leaving their work stations during their 72 hour work week. Management locked the doors to stairwells and women jumped to their deaths or burned in place. The International Garment Worker’s Union grew largely due to that fire. This is a time to remind the reader that unions were not some spontaneous expression of antagonism to management and corporations; they were instead caused by corporate and management abuse of power. Unions were an answer to capricious and arbitrary decisions about wages and working conditions. This was true in industry, in mining, in railroads and in all sectors of economic activity. At their peak in 1954, unions represented nearly 36% of American workers and had an influence that reached all economic sectors. It was about that time that corporate management and state governments felt that wages and, therefore, pensions had grown too large. As a result, “right to work” laws were enacted in many southern states. Quickly, textile and shoe and manufacturing corporations fled south where they got tax breaks, free land and other incentives to relocate their businesses. Unions shrank. In some “right to work” states the remaining unions were required to represent workers who paid no dues based on new laws. This was a blow both to union financing and to membership. Today, only about 7% of the private sector is unionized. Note that wages continued to fall without union protection and the flood of companies that surged into Alabama, the Carolinas and even Georgia and Tennessee did not stop their lower wage migration. They soon left to manufacture in Asia; first in Japan and then Taiwan and then Mainland China and even Vietnam and Malaysia. Once the cascade for lower wages begins, it becomes an unstoppable torrent that falls ever further to find the most depressed economies.
During this period, unions made concessions, perhaps in the hope of maintaining some of the jobs that were available and unions were characterized by corporations as the source of our economic problems. As a single example, the auto industry, notably GM, moved to “right to work” states to avoid unions. GM established Saturn in 1985, and it went out of business completely in 2010 without ever earning a single dollar profit in all the years it existed in Tennessee. GM had blamed unions for its woes when unsatisfactory leadership by CEO Roger Smith, unsatisfactory quality, especially in the early years, and competition with its other GM brands caused Saturn to fail. Failure had nothing to do with unions. Quality competition from Europe and Asia, where wages eventually became higher than American wages actually depressed GM sales along with other US automakers. Blame the unions? Boeing strove to kill unions with its 787 “Dreamliner” by outsourcing major components overseas. Result? Boeing is 3 years past due on delivery and billions over budget by not using their experienced union labor.
With the decline of union membership in US corporations, there came a nearly simultaneous, although mostly unrelated, growth in public sector unions. Once again, unions were caused and not a simultaneous expression of hatred for management. The largest single factor for public sector union growth was the simple fact that government jobs had been used as political capital for patronage and that workers had no control over being fired arbitrarily as a new party was swept into power. At the national level, civil service rules assisted workers to some extent, but that was reversed under GW Bush who wanted more freedom to “reward and punish performance” as he put the issue. In fact, patronage jobs went far deeper under GW Bush than any prior president. States quickly followed suit, except that unions were a stabilizing force that kept most workers on their jobs despite the political winds of change. That was good for both the workers and for people expecting continuity of quality public service despite varying election outcomes. The Bush model increased worker turbulance.
Fast forward to late 2007 and the continuing burden of a war of choice in Iraq and growing war efforts in Afghanistan and the collapse of the housing and lending industry due to malfeasance of corporate management and fundamental greed and…Poof! We have an unmatched fiscal and job crisis unseen since FDR’s days. Obviously, somebody should be punished for the widespread fraud and failure of our lending and our investment institutions. Pension funds, both individual and institutional, were devastated. Jobs were slashed. Balanced budgets became distant memories. Who can we punish? The perpetrators? Well, no. They are too big to fail. Let us get concessions from those who lost money in the pension funds and layoffs. Somebody has to pay. And so it came to pass that public sector unions and the real people who pay taxes were called upon to make new concessions. They did. Now if you can afford the tax accountants and attorneys to protect your income, you can still send your bonus dollars to the Grand Caymans for safekeeping.
Return to Wisconsin and Governor Scott Walker (bankrolled by Koch Industries) and you see the drama played out to bust unions and finally undo what FDR and unions wrought after years of fighting for some justice in treatment of labor. If unions are eliminated by this well financed conservative push, then you need to remember that it was unions that bargained collectively for each of us. I have never been a union member, but my pay was influenced by what unions derived at the table. Even in the Army, my pay was increased by what the postal workers were able to get through collective bargaining. If that is eliminated, then kiss goodbye to social and economic mobility as well as safety and stability. Bye to safety nets like public education, Social Security and Medicare. Say hello to the new robber barons and their conservative supporters who will finally undo the New Deal and present the Raw Deal. Unions, weak as they are, may be our last best hope to preserve education, dignity and mobility in these United States. We are moving from the justice of the people to the “just us” of the Oligarchs. Please speak up before it is too late. Maybe it is also time to impeach a few of the “Supremes” for conflict of interest.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
20 February 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
In Case You had any Doubts
In case you had any doubts about what the recent elections (a landslide for Republicans) and the continuing effects of the economic meltdown portend, a few episodes should dispel them. I think my favorite this week is what’s going on in Wisconsin. There, once the cradle of radical politics not to mention the birth in the 50s of the public employee union movement, a yahoo by the name of Scott Walker was elected governor, and both houses of the legislature fell to the Republicans as well (not to mention the defeat of one of the last ethical Senators, Russ Feingold.) I’m not sure what happened to the drinking water in Wisconsin, but the results are beginning to play out big time. Governor Walker has initiated a bill, just passed by the budget committee, that would strip Wisconsin’s public employee unions of their right to collective bargaining. So where most of us thought that the right to collective bargaining was an issue long-since settled (after millions marched, endured beatings from hired thugs, and were murdered by those same thugs in the battles for union rights), it now turns out that this wannabe dictator in Wisconsin is coming close to turning back the clock on teachers, prison guards and other public employees. This so his plan to force these employees to pay more of the cost of their pensions and health care costs could not be reversed by collective bargaining. Isn’t that nice? Not only that, the unions would be hamstrung so that pay increases would be tied to the Consumer Price Index only. And to enforce his decrees, Walker has threatened to call out the National Guard to run the prisons (just in case the prison guards try to strike). So there you have it: no collective bargaining, no effective striking, no power to unions at all (does it need to be said that public unions are about the only large groups left contributing to the Democratic Party?).
If this bill goes through—and the Gov claims he has the votes to do it—another nail in the coffin of unions and collective bargaining would be hammered in. The movement started shortly after WWII by big corporations, and sent into high gear by Ronald Reagan when he fired Air Traffic Controllers to cripple their union (and all others), will have come to fruition. Does it need to be pointed out that this comes at just the time when American corporations are at the very height of their power, having been given, in the Citizens United case in the Supreme Court, carte blanche to pay politicians for the favors they already controlled before? Now, with this complete judicial sanction to corporations to buy whatever government they please (is it any wonder that Obama has kowtowed almost completely to the moneyed interests, and hired the head of General Electric, for god’s sake, which outsources to foreign countries more than half of its work, to be his top economic advisor in charge of “putting Americans back to work?”), the fiction that America is a “government of the people” has become laughable, a cruel, sick joke.
One could add more. In Florida, the Governor there has just axed the planned high-speed rail project, saying the state could not afford it. But the federal government was providing millions in seed money, and the state had already spent more millions in planning for the rail system that was projected to add millions to the tourist economy on which Florida depends (not to mention reducing automobile pollution). And hundreds of thousands of workers would have been hired to complete and then run the project. Nevermind. Those were just “workers” after all, and in the Republican version of economics, workers, like the environment, are simply expendable.
The irony, I suppose, is that all this is taking place at a time when in the Middle East, where democracy has only been a label to dress up dictatorships, the people really are in revolt. So as we watch thousands and millions in Egypt and Tunisia rise up, protest their powerlessness, and force their dictators to resign, and thousands more in Bahrain and Yemen take to the streets to try to do the same, here in the U.S.A. the “people” have so far been mute. Not in Wisconsin, thankfully, where thousands of teachers camped out in the state capitol to protest the proposed slashing of their rights. But in most other places, the “people” have been largely sidelined by the logic of what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine.” That is, when those in power wish to cripple their opposition and remake society to their liking (i.e. privatize publicly-owned utilities/schools/industries, eliminate social programs that benefit the poor, reduce taxes on the rich), the best way to do so is to wait for or engineer a shock to the system—something like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or 9/11 throughout the nation. And so, what we are seeing now, after the “shock” of the financial collapse in 2007-08, and to combat which the federal government bailed out banks and wall street with borrowed money, is all this conservative blather about THE FEDERAL DEFICIT. ‘We have to bring spending under control. We have to manage our nation’s budget the same way families do. Control our spending. Trim our sails.’ And what has to be trimmed? Why all that spending on the poor, all that spending on health care for those who can’t afford it like Medicaid, all those handouts to those lazy ones who line up for food stamps and health care for their children and block grants to local clinics and, ultimately, that major “handout” conceived by the demon Roosevelt Administration, Social Security.
Ah yes. The shock has been administered, and now come the shocking proposals. Not the masters of war, not the crooks on Wall St, not the bankers and corporate CEOs, but public employees are the freeloaders. Why should they get pensions? Why should they get free health care? Why should their unions get to hold up taxpayers with their threats of strikes? Why should we get taxed to pay for their benefits? Privatize everything. Bring in the corporate mavens to run (or is it ruin?) everything.
Ah America. The day of awakening is coming, the day of accounting is coming, and it’s not going to be pretty.
Lawrence DiStasi
If this bill goes through—and the Gov claims he has the votes to do it—another nail in the coffin of unions and collective bargaining would be hammered in. The movement started shortly after WWII by big corporations, and sent into high gear by Ronald Reagan when he fired Air Traffic Controllers to cripple their union (and all others), will have come to fruition. Does it need to be pointed out that this comes at just the time when American corporations are at the very height of their power, having been given, in the Citizens United case in the Supreme Court, carte blanche to pay politicians for the favors they already controlled before? Now, with this complete judicial sanction to corporations to buy whatever government they please (is it any wonder that Obama has kowtowed almost completely to the moneyed interests, and hired the head of General Electric, for god’s sake, which outsources to foreign countries more than half of its work, to be his top economic advisor in charge of “putting Americans back to work?”), the fiction that America is a “government of the people” has become laughable, a cruel, sick joke.
One could add more. In Florida, the Governor there has just axed the planned high-speed rail project, saying the state could not afford it. But the federal government was providing millions in seed money, and the state had already spent more millions in planning for the rail system that was projected to add millions to the tourist economy on which Florida depends (not to mention reducing automobile pollution). And hundreds of thousands of workers would have been hired to complete and then run the project. Nevermind. Those were just “workers” after all, and in the Republican version of economics, workers, like the environment, are simply expendable.
The irony, I suppose, is that all this is taking place at a time when in the Middle East, where democracy has only been a label to dress up dictatorships, the people really are in revolt. So as we watch thousands and millions in Egypt and Tunisia rise up, protest their powerlessness, and force their dictators to resign, and thousands more in Bahrain and Yemen take to the streets to try to do the same, here in the U.S.A. the “people” have so far been mute. Not in Wisconsin, thankfully, where thousands of teachers camped out in the state capitol to protest the proposed slashing of their rights. But in most other places, the “people” have been largely sidelined by the logic of what Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine.” That is, when those in power wish to cripple their opposition and remake society to their liking (i.e. privatize publicly-owned utilities/schools/industries, eliminate social programs that benefit the poor, reduce taxes on the rich), the best way to do so is to wait for or engineer a shock to the system—something like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or 9/11 throughout the nation. And so, what we are seeing now, after the “shock” of the financial collapse in 2007-08, and to combat which the federal government bailed out banks and wall street with borrowed money, is all this conservative blather about THE FEDERAL DEFICIT. ‘We have to bring spending under control. We have to manage our nation’s budget the same way families do. Control our spending. Trim our sails.’ And what has to be trimmed? Why all that spending on the poor, all that spending on health care for those who can’t afford it like Medicaid, all those handouts to those lazy ones who line up for food stamps and health care for their children and block grants to local clinics and, ultimately, that major “handout” conceived by the demon Roosevelt Administration, Social Security.
Ah yes. The shock has been administered, and now come the shocking proposals. Not the masters of war, not the crooks on Wall St, not the bankers and corporate CEOs, but public employees are the freeloaders. Why should they get pensions? Why should they get free health care? Why should their unions get to hold up taxpayers with their threats of strikes? Why should we get taxed to pay for their benefits? Privatize everything. Bring in the corporate mavens to run (or is it ruin?) everything.
Ah America. The day of awakening is coming, the day of accounting is coming, and it’s not going to be pretty.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Genesis of Failure
A smirk, a nod, a wink
Now who would ever think
That could erode our state’s
Effectiveness and charm
Or destabilize our fate
And do us long term harm
But the smirk became a sneer
That broadened every year
Becoming then a smear
That covered efforts dear
And that became a shout
To throw the bastards out
And shouts became the shots
At the haves from the have nots
As I try to make sense out of the current state of our democracy, I am reminded how Ronald Reagan cleverly created anecdotes to emphasize his political points, but even Reagan would not be able to understand how much this one anecdote has morphed. You may recall Reagan telling this “story”: “I am from the government and I am here to help.” It was pretty innocent and meant to generate a smirk or two if not a laugh. Yes, of course, Reagan emphasized the negative aspects of government in order to make a political point as well as to entertain his audiences. He favored outsourcing and espoused “small” government although he grew it at an alarming pace along with additional deficits of $1.6 trillion. At no time, in my recollection, did Reagan suggest the destruction of government in order to reach his goals. That task was seized by Grover Norquist: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Drowning is destruction in most contexts including that of government. We will look at how that concept of destruction has gone viral.
It took years after Reagan for the smirk to become a sneer. Under Clinton, the negative regard for government took deeper root. Right wing Christian fundamentalists led the charge against Clinton partly due to his personal behavior yet the government shrunk slightly during his Administration. Under Clinton, another aspect contributed to the erosion of faith in government. The Waco, Texas law enforcement against Davidians seemed eerily similar to the war philosophy of destroying a village in order to save it. Clearly, Davidians were armed and wrong, but did our methods exceed expected enforcement? Clinton added $1.5 trillion to our debt in his 8-year administration, while our debt grew by another $1.6 trillion in a mere 4 years under GHW Bush. Clinton was followed by GW Bush who added a whopping $5.5 trillion to our debt. The “conservative Republican” portion of the $10.5 trillion added to our national debt prior to Obama was $8.7 trillion. GW Bush alone accounted for 64% of the added debt under Republicans. Bush Jr. may have been influenced by Vice President Dick Cheney who simply said: “Deficits don’t matter.” Deficits have become a major talking point by citizens on both sides of the political divide with largely conservative rhetoric followed by profligate spending. This has exacerbated distrust of government as well as income differences. We borrowed money to fund tax reductions and moved to tax rates not seen since 1950. The move sharply increased incomes for the rich while the middle class received a smaller share and lost good manufacturing jobs. Tax and spend or borrow and spend?
Another controversial policy that eroded our faith in government was the removal of a social safety net that protected both mentally ill individuals and society at large. The Lamterman-Petris-Short Act signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of neglect of mental health patients by transferring them to community centers where they languished and lacked the intensive support of psychiatric institutions. At the time in 1967, it appeared to be a humane way to reduce costs and yet provide an effective structure for delivering care and it came with some federal money to reduce the impact on California. The law also prohibited involuntary commitment, so, predictably, some patients refused treatment. Unfortunately, many patients soon were simply homeless and without treatment while they became more visible to the general population. His budget bill abolished 1700 hospital staff positions and closed several state-operated aftercare facilities. People discovered the previously invisible mental patients and many reacted as though government had failed again.
Trust in government has tanked in the past couple decades and excessive spending but borrowing has only played into that image. Another contributor was media extremists like Rush Limbaugh, who has imitators but no peer on the left, depend on outrageous accusations and chatter that help erode respect for government while they build listener rosters. I have recently seen Glen Beck call for “shooting Democrats in the head,” supposedly before they “shoot you in the head.” Increasingly, citizens have begun to relate to “government” as some anonymous and distant “enemy” rather than an outcome of democratic voting. They wanted more immediate and responsive action to address grievances or fears. In the 2000 election, right wing activists stormed some vote counting centers in Florida demanding immediate redress by stopping recounts. Today, they would probably carry guns. This seems to be just opposite what democratic processes require. Miss-steps by elected government continued, however. Under Bush Jr., for example, the questionable war in Iraq was followed by the establishment of a domestic monitoring system of all phone calls by ATT from a San Francisco center. That became a reality that shook some Americans, although it was allegedly done to eliminate and then monitor terrorists. Could Americans be the focus of information gathering by their government? For some, this added to their distrust of government while others felt that the practice was needed to spy on potential terrorists. A divide opened wider and “foreign terrorists” were targets of vituperative language. Soon anybody that looked or sounded Middle-Eastern or Islamic was isolated and condemned in the media and some political extremists. As the economy slipped to recession in 2007 and 2008, additional blame games began. The middle class shrunk while the rich were much richer and while some blamed government policies, others blamed Mexican immigrants. The anti-immigrant rhetoric soared. Meanwhile the arming of individual Americans grew with the lexicon of fear. Some Tea Party events look more like sedition than support of conservative policy.
If you are both a plutocrat and an extremist, then one way of accelerating your goals would be to have the government acquire so much debt that only draconian measures could save the day by, for example, eliminating all entitlement programs. The programs of the FDR Administration rankle ultra conservatives who are still looking to repeal the New Deal. Failing to fund the Iraqi war, added massively to our debt. The arguments for tax breaks are simple and persuasive. It is your money that you earned, why let the government take it away? Instead of tax and spend, it became borrow and spend. Unfortunately, it is not our money. It is money from China, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Korea and they demand interest. The reality of borrowing escapes the logic and the rhetoric.
Unfortunately, the average American is told that his/her jobs are being taken by “illegals” and we need to stop the flow. Were the flow to stop, wages would rise and plutocrats would fight that until wages fell again. Meanwhile, agitators can blame all this on the “government.” What a wonderful world. In the past couple years, even the word “tyranny” has gained traction at rallies and demonstrations. America is far from tyranny, but closer to uprisings. The behavior has become more enflamed and the rhetoric more combative as well as irrational as people fall from the middle class. Banks gambled and homeowners lost, but the government got blamed instead of banks. Permissive regulation contributed heavily to the gambling, and yet the cry by banking is to remove the few regulations that remain. Profits are literally at an all-time high and yet the Chamber of Commerce and other groups are complaining that the government has too much control. Pundits and commentators take up the chant and the chant becomes a shout: “Throw the bastards out.” As we create more have-nots and engorge the plutocrats we also limit opportunities to educate our citizens. Reducing taxes reduces public education, the historic avenue to improve our lives. Wages are stagnant. Homes are lost. Desperation grows and the stable become shaky while the unstable become explosive. “Kill the government,” forgetting that the government is us. Opponents become enemies. Differences become targets. Shouts become gunshots. Selfishness replaces commonwealth. Death replaces life. Failure is in birth throes.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
15 January 2011
Now who would ever think
That could erode our state’s
Effectiveness and charm
Or destabilize our fate
And do us long term harm
But the smirk became a sneer
That broadened every year
Becoming then a smear
That covered efforts dear
And that became a shout
To throw the bastards out
And shouts became the shots
At the haves from the have nots
As I try to make sense out of the current state of our democracy, I am reminded how Ronald Reagan cleverly created anecdotes to emphasize his political points, but even Reagan would not be able to understand how much this one anecdote has morphed. You may recall Reagan telling this “story”: “I am from the government and I am here to help.” It was pretty innocent and meant to generate a smirk or two if not a laugh. Yes, of course, Reagan emphasized the negative aspects of government in order to make a political point as well as to entertain his audiences. He favored outsourcing and espoused “small” government although he grew it at an alarming pace along with additional deficits of $1.6 trillion. At no time, in my recollection, did Reagan suggest the destruction of government in order to reach his goals. That task was seized by Grover Norquist: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Drowning is destruction in most contexts including that of government. We will look at how that concept of destruction has gone viral.
It took years after Reagan for the smirk to become a sneer. Under Clinton, the negative regard for government took deeper root. Right wing Christian fundamentalists led the charge against Clinton partly due to his personal behavior yet the government shrunk slightly during his Administration. Under Clinton, another aspect contributed to the erosion of faith in government. The Waco, Texas law enforcement against Davidians seemed eerily similar to the war philosophy of destroying a village in order to save it. Clearly, Davidians were armed and wrong, but did our methods exceed expected enforcement? Clinton added $1.5 trillion to our debt in his 8-year administration, while our debt grew by another $1.6 trillion in a mere 4 years under GHW Bush. Clinton was followed by GW Bush who added a whopping $5.5 trillion to our debt. The “conservative Republican” portion of the $10.5 trillion added to our national debt prior to Obama was $8.7 trillion. GW Bush alone accounted for 64% of the added debt under Republicans. Bush Jr. may have been influenced by Vice President Dick Cheney who simply said: “Deficits don’t matter.” Deficits have become a major talking point by citizens on both sides of the political divide with largely conservative rhetoric followed by profligate spending. This has exacerbated distrust of government as well as income differences. We borrowed money to fund tax reductions and moved to tax rates not seen since 1950. The move sharply increased incomes for the rich while the middle class received a smaller share and lost good manufacturing jobs. Tax and spend or borrow and spend?
Another controversial policy that eroded our faith in government was the removal of a social safety net that protected both mentally ill individuals and society at large. The Lamterman-Petris-Short Act signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era of neglect of mental health patients by transferring them to community centers where they languished and lacked the intensive support of psychiatric institutions. At the time in 1967, it appeared to be a humane way to reduce costs and yet provide an effective structure for delivering care and it came with some federal money to reduce the impact on California. The law also prohibited involuntary commitment, so, predictably, some patients refused treatment. Unfortunately, many patients soon were simply homeless and without treatment while they became more visible to the general population. His budget bill abolished 1700 hospital staff positions and closed several state-operated aftercare facilities. People discovered the previously invisible mental patients and many reacted as though government had failed again.
Trust in government has tanked in the past couple decades and excessive spending but borrowing has only played into that image. Another contributor was media extremists like Rush Limbaugh, who has imitators but no peer on the left, depend on outrageous accusations and chatter that help erode respect for government while they build listener rosters. I have recently seen Glen Beck call for “shooting Democrats in the head,” supposedly before they “shoot you in the head.” Increasingly, citizens have begun to relate to “government” as some anonymous and distant “enemy” rather than an outcome of democratic voting. They wanted more immediate and responsive action to address grievances or fears. In the 2000 election, right wing activists stormed some vote counting centers in Florida demanding immediate redress by stopping recounts. Today, they would probably carry guns. This seems to be just opposite what democratic processes require. Miss-steps by elected government continued, however. Under Bush Jr., for example, the questionable war in Iraq was followed by the establishment of a domestic monitoring system of all phone calls by ATT from a San Francisco center. That became a reality that shook some Americans, although it was allegedly done to eliminate and then monitor terrorists. Could Americans be the focus of information gathering by their government? For some, this added to their distrust of government while others felt that the practice was needed to spy on potential terrorists. A divide opened wider and “foreign terrorists” were targets of vituperative language. Soon anybody that looked or sounded Middle-Eastern or Islamic was isolated and condemned in the media and some political extremists. As the economy slipped to recession in 2007 and 2008, additional blame games began. The middle class shrunk while the rich were much richer and while some blamed government policies, others blamed Mexican immigrants. The anti-immigrant rhetoric soared. Meanwhile the arming of individual Americans grew with the lexicon of fear. Some Tea Party events look more like sedition than support of conservative policy.
If you are both a plutocrat and an extremist, then one way of accelerating your goals would be to have the government acquire so much debt that only draconian measures could save the day by, for example, eliminating all entitlement programs. The programs of the FDR Administration rankle ultra conservatives who are still looking to repeal the New Deal. Failing to fund the Iraqi war, added massively to our debt. The arguments for tax breaks are simple and persuasive. It is your money that you earned, why let the government take it away? Instead of tax and spend, it became borrow and spend. Unfortunately, it is not our money. It is money from China, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Korea and they demand interest. The reality of borrowing escapes the logic and the rhetoric.
Unfortunately, the average American is told that his/her jobs are being taken by “illegals” and we need to stop the flow. Were the flow to stop, wages would rise and plutocrats would fight that until wages fell again. Meanwhile, agitators can blame all this on the “government.” What a wonderful world. In the past couple years, even the word “tyranny” has gained traction at rallies and demonstrations. America is far from tyranny, but closer to uprisings. The behavior has become more enflamed and the rhetoric more combative as well as irrational as people fall from the middle class. Banks gambled and homeowners lost, but the government got blamed instead of banks. Permissive regulation contributed heavily to the gambling, and yet the cry by banking is to remove the few regulations that remain. Profits are literally at an all-time high and yet the Chamber of Commerce and other groups are complaining that the government has too much control. Pundits and commentators take up the chant and the chant becomes a shout: “Throw the bastards out.” As we create more have-nots and engorge the plutocrats we also limit opportunities to educate our citizens. Reducing taxes reduces public education, the historic avenue to improve our lives. Wages are stagnant. Homes are lost. Desperation grows and the stable become shaky while the unstable become explosive. “Kill the government,” forgetting that the government is us. Opponents become enemies. Differences become targets. Shouts become gunshots. Selfishness replaces commonwealth. Death replaces life. Failure is in birth throes.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
15 January 2011
Monday, January 03, 2011
Who/What Do You Think You Are?
The year’s end often brings up thoughts about fundamentals, and this one is no different. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this odd fact: though we have all kinds of religions and spiritual practices, and though science has brought us insight and evidence about natural processes from the inconceivably huge—the universe, said to have originated 15 billion years ago with a Big Bang—to the infinitely small—particles so puzzling they can hardly be said to have an actual existence beyond a certain probability, yet the whole existence in which we are engaged is still an almost total mystery. Who are we? What are we? We don’t know. We all have beliefs about this; and half-baked ideas from popular versions of science; but when it comes right down to it, we not only don’t know who we are or what we are, but even less about why we’re even here. How we’re even here. Why the human race is even here (sometimes, and often these days, it appears we’re here to fuck up the planet so badly that it becomes unlivable not just for us, but for all else. Even prehistorically, as Edward O. Wilson in The Future of Life says, man, far from being a “noble savage,” was and is “the planetary killer…Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse.”)
But for now, let’s just look at this simple question: Which is primary, matter or mind (sometimes referred to as spirit, soul, etc.)? Science, of course, has few doubts about this. Matter spontaneously generated life (it used to be thought that light energy, a flash of lightning perhaps, was needed to ignite basic chemicals into amino acids; now, much research is focused on life originating in the oceans near the deep vents—sites where exudations of sulfur and heat from the earth’s interior generate anaerobic bacteria, and strange life-forms that require neither light nor oxygen), and from tiny one-celled organisms continued to evolve into more and more complex organisms over billions of years until finally, there was us. In fact, for most of the previous hundreds of years, scientists did not even consider ‘mind’ a fit term to investigate. More recently, though, psychologists and neuroscientists have been looking more seriously into this thing called ‘mind.’ And though they’re still not sure what mind is, or where it’s located, it appears to be some product of matter, specifically the brain, and to have a ‘real’ existence. When it comes to priority, though, most scientists would be adamant: matter comes first. And this has meant, logically, that our era has become the age of materialism. Matter is what matters. All conclusions about origins and purpose stem from that.
Materialism, though, is precisely what many thoughtful people—philosophers, artists, spiritual seekers, religious leaders—find wanting. And so the origin stories that have come down to us from great thinkers and spiritual leaders all put matter secondary to something else: spirit, soul, mind, ideal forms, consciousness, something immaterial. And, that that something immaterial either is or gives birth to mind. In Genesis, God—the great spiritual, eternal being—creates the universe and all in it, including all the various animals and humans, in seven days. God speaks the Word (or is the word), and it is made flesh, or is clothed in flesh. Thus, the breath of some creator God instills life and order into a previously dead and chaotic mess of something, or nothing. And keeps it going. And the task of beings, especially human beings, is to seek to obey and eventually to reunite with that creator God in a more ideal place, an Afterlife. In eastern traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, the theoretical base suggests that some sort of Cosmic Mind has priority. From that big mind emerges the forms that are designed to survive in the material world: cells, bodies, and all that drives them from the beginning, mainly desire for increase and security. The task of the human—built as a vehicle for contemplating all of existence, sometimes imaged as the desire of the creator mind to reflect or contemplate itself—is to come to some sort of realization of what is true and real, above and prior to the material self that is secondary and, in some sense, illusory. As Karen Armstrong puts it in the Great Transformation: “The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being. It could, therefore, be discovered in the depths of the self.” It takes most humans several lifetimes to accomplish this; meantime, the imperishable part keeps recycling through life forms (rebirth or reincarnation) over and over. Plato’s image of the cave provides a concrete image for a similar idea. That is, the ideal forms that are primary and eternal for Plato, are not seen by normal beings, who see only reflections—reality reflected by firelight on the wall of a cave. Most humans, that is, see only the physical world, which is changing constantly, and which was created by a demiurge. Though the world he created was based on the eternal forms, it is really only a weak, pale reflection of the true forms. These eternal forms themselves are accessible only to philosophical reason and exalted perception.
It is clear then that two positions are available to us all. Either we consider material existence the be-all and end-all; which is to say that we are born, our brains generate an entity we call mind, we mature, and we die; one shot and that’s the end of it. OR, we are aggregates of some stuff that is really only a pale shadow of a more fundamental reality—a prior and superior mind or soul that we can unite with through the proper rational, behavioral, spiritual, or contemplative practices. Those who subscribe to the first view are sometimes called ‘realists;’ those who subscribe to the second are sometimes called ‘idealists.’ Which are you?
What has given new life to such questions is the emergence, in recent years, of formerly esoteric practices, mostly from the east, coupled with interpretations of scientific developments that appear to provide real-world support for those esoteric views. Consider this quote from a recent book, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind, Robert Nadeau and Menos Kafatos, Oxford U Press: 1999:
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts, one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious. (p. 197)
What this interpretation leads to—starting from a wholly materialistic view based in the most materialistic of all scientific paradigms, evolution—is the rather idealistic view that the material universe is actually not dead matter at all; it is alive. It is, in some sense that we are still not clear about, conscious. More, that this universal, conscious whole—that which may have given rise to the idea called ‘God’—“exists in some sense within all [its] parts.” Which is to say, in each one of us.
So what are we? Are we truly separate selves going about our daily lives as best we can—which is to stay alive long enough to reproduce our kind in a way that helps them not just survive, but out-compete all other beings? Or are we interconnected manifestations of some incomprehensible whole, some mind that has not only generated us, but which is within each one of us and thus accessible to our self-reflection?
And how can we tell? What would serve as proof of one or the other position? Is there such a thing as proof; or is there simply belief? And what does it matter?
I would suggest that the view one settles on matters profoundly. For what we believe about who or what we are is the basis for all sorts of decisions about how to act—both towards all other humans (not just those in our tribe), and towards the world as a whole. And it is this that will increasingly, I think, become the crucial matter for all of us.
Obviously, there is more to say about this. Later.
Lawrence DiStasi
But for now, let’s just look at this simple question: Which is primary, matter or mind (sometimes referred to as spirit, soul, etc.)? Science, of course, has few doubts about this. Matter spontaneously generated life (it used to be thought that light energy, a flash of lightning perhaps, was needed to ignite basic chemicals into amino acids; now, much research is focused on life originating in the oceans near the deep vents—sites where exudations of sulfur and heat from the earth’s interior generate anaerobic bacteria, and strange life-forms that require neither light nor oxygen), and from tiny one-celled organisms continued to evolve into more and more complex organisms over billions of years until finally, there was us. In fact, for most of the previous hundreds of years, scientists did not even consider ‘mind’ a fit term to investigate. More recently, though, psychologists and neuroscientists have been looking more seriously into this thing called ‘mind.’ And though they’re still not sure what mind is, or where it’s located, it appears to be some product of matter, specifically the brain, and to have a ‘real’ existence. When it comes to priority, though, most scientists would be adamant: matter comes first. And this has meant, logically, that our era has become the age of materialism. Matter is what matters. All conclusions about origins and purpose stem from that.
Materialism, though, is precisely what many thoughtful people—philosophers, artists, spiritual seekers, religious leaders—find wanting. And so the origin stories that have come down to us from great thinkers and spiritual leaders all put matter secondary to something else: spirit, soul, mind, ideal forms, consciousness, something immaterial. And, that that something immaterial either is or gives birth to mind. In Genesis, God—the great spiritual, eternal being—creates the universe and all in it, including all the various animals and humans, in seven days. God speaks the Word (or is the word), and it is made flesh, or is clothed in flesh. Thus, the breath of some creator God instills life and order into a previously dead and chaotic mess of something, or nothing. And keeps it going. And the task of beings, especially human beings, is to seek to obey and eventually to reunite with that creator God in a more ideal place, an Afterlife. In eastern traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, the theoretical base suggests that some sort of Cosmic Mind has priority. From that big mind emerges the forms that are designed to survive in the material world: cells, bodies, and all that drives them from the beginning, mainly desire for increase and security. The task of the human—built as a vehicle for contemplating all of existence, sometimes imaged as the desire of the creator mind to reflect or contemplate itself—is to come to some sort of realization of what is true and real, above and prior to the material self that is secondary and, in some sense, illusory. As Karen Armstrong puts it in the Great Transformation: “The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being. It could, therefore, be discovered in the depths of the self.” It takes most humans several lifetimes to accomplish this; meantime, the imperishable part keeps recycling through life forms (rebirth or reincarnation) over and over. Plato’s image of the cave provides a concrete image for a similar idea. That is, the ideal forms that are primary and eternal for Plato, are not seen by normal beings, who see only reflections—reality reflected by firelight on the wall of a cave. Most humans, that is, see only the physical world, which is changing constantly, and which was created by a demiurge. Though the world he created was based on the eternal forms, it is really only a weak, pale reflection of the true forms. These eternal forms themselves are accessible only to philosophical reason and exalted perception.
It is clear then that two positions are available to us all. Either we consider material existence the be-all and end-all; which is to say that we are born, our brains generate an entity we call mind, we mature, and we die; one shot and that’s the end of it. OR, we are aggregates of some stuff that is really only a pale shadow of a more fundamental reality—a prior and superior mind or soul that we can unite with through the proper rational, behavioral, spiritual, or contemplative practices. Those who subscribe to the first view are sometimes called ‘realists;’ those who subscribe to the second are sometimes called ‘idealists.’ Which are you?
What has given new life to such questions is the emergence, in recent years, of formerly esoteric practices, mostly from the east, coupled with interpretations of scientific developments that appear to provide real-world support for those esoteric views. Consider this quote from a recent book, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind, Robert Nadeau and Menos Kafatos, Oxford U Press: 1999:
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts, one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious. (p. 197)
What this interpretation leads to—starting from a wholly materialistic view based in the most materialistic of all scientific paradigms, evolution—is the rather idealistic view that the material universe is actually not dead matter at all; it is alive. It is, in some sense that we are still not clear about, conscious. More, that this universal, conscious whole—that which may have given rise to the idea called ‘God’—“exists in some sense within all [its] parts.” Which is to say, in each one of us.
So what are we? Are we truly separate selves going about our daily lives as best we can—which is to stay alive long enough to reproduce our kind in a way that helps them not just survive, but out-compete all other beings? Or are we interconnected manifestations of some incomprehensible whole, some mind that has not only generated us, but which is within each one of us and thus accessible to our self-reflection?
And how can we tell? What would serve as proof of one or the other position? Is there such a thing as proof; or is there simply belief? And what does it matter?
I would suggest that the view one settles on matters profoundly. For what we believe about who or what we are is the basis for all sorts of decisions about how to act—both towards all other humans (not just those in our tribe), and towards the world as a whole. And it is this that will increasingly, I think, become the crucial matter for all of us.
Obviously, there is more to say about this. Later.
Lawrence DiStasi
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